Book: 20250112 to 20250430, "Deep Utopia" by Nick Bostrom

20250114 - Monday

Hot springs postponed
Argumentum ad opulentium
Walls of sausages
Keynes’s prediction
New needs and niceties
Social projects
The desire for more
Perfect or imperfect automation
A simple three-factor model
Paradoxes of a Malthusian world
Up and down on different timescales
Excellence
Disequilibria
Economies of scale
Running out of time
To the baths
Feodor the Fox
Outro

Technological progress might create new ways of converting money into either quality or quantity of life, ways that don't have the same steeply diminishing returns that we experience today. p9

Not true. The price of those goods and services will drop quickly. For example, cancer-specific drugs.

Even the price of best computer chips and satellite launching dropped dramatically in the past 10 years, and will continue for the next 30 years.

Land price went up a lot. But that's investment, not consumption.

Second, the economy in this full-bore automation scenario would most likely expand explosively, causing average income to shoot up. p17

At the moment, the supply of goods exceeds the demand by a large margin. Automation can increase the supply of goods much further, or significantly reduce the cost. So, the economy will ony expand slightly, if UBI is implemented.

Third, the increased average wealth in this scenario would likely reduce labor supply, since wealthier people would choose to work less at any given wage level. p17

This one is confusing. Automation means the demand of labor supply will drop a lot, so the average income of most of people will go down drastically.

The assumptions that there is no technological progress and no increase in land are, I think, less rickety than might initially appear. p21

This is completely wrong. How much land(natural resources) we have, depends on how advanced our technology is. In the past 5000 years, every time when technology got a new breakthrough (and be used widely), the econology volume increased a lot. No exception.

For example, cruise trip. If everyone's extremely wealthy, then every family or even everyone want to rent a relatively small cruise for the trip, instead of thousands of people stayed in one cruise for many days. After that, people may want to go to Mars in a few months, then in a few weeks and then even in a few days. Every family or even everyone may want to rent a spaceship to do that. What's going to happen after that? I don't know yet, but some people will have a lot of good ideas about extremely high cost experiences.

Malthusian condition is wrong. It presume that the total volume of the cake is fixed, so the less population the better. In reality, more population means more talented people, and peace means people can focus more on production instead of destruction.

Without progress in the way that our civilization governs itself, increases in our material powers could easily make things worse instead of better. p31

Agree, but how would it hurt normal people? For example, everyone waste their attention on meaningless activities, such as screen interactions? Then average intelligence and fertility rate drop signatifically.

Labor, capital, land.

These three factors are weird. It missed a few important ones, such as knowledge and tools.

We are entering the critical breaking point. Computer, AI and the incoming Quantum computing will push up our capabilities for many orders of magnitude, before stablizing at some point.
The question is, what that would bring to us, if it doesn't annihilate us.

20250201 - Tuesday

A stay of exequies
Recapitulation
Our cosmic endowment
Technological maturity
Coordination
Prudential barriers
Axiological contours

Saturation is a real problem.

Normally we will accumulate assets, including children. In deep utopia, there is not much can prove that we are improving and growing.

Then we lose purpose of life.

Is UBI(universal basic income) or UHI(universal high income) capitulationism? What can we do if no job left for us, and UBI is reality?

We must find something to prove that we are improving.

Can hobby replace career? What's the difference between hobby and computer game? Computer game cannot prove that we are improving.

Metaphysics
What machines can’t do for you
Impossible inputs
Feodor the Fox

Pignolius observes that our judgments about the merits of the world are mostly simply a reflection of our own habitual mood - somtimes not even our habitual mood but how we feel at the moments. p98

100% correct. How can I avoid being misguided like this? Live in the moment.

20250222 - Wednesday

Full unemployment
Brawl, steal, overeat, drink, and sleep late
Templates of otium
Leisure culture
Message from the Dean
Wild eyes?
The purpose problem revisited
Case study 1: Shopping
Case study 2: Exercising
Case study 3: Learning
Case study 4: Parenting
From shallow to deep redundancy
Paradox of progress
A five-ringed defense
Signs and sightings
The upholstery of dreams
Fictional characters
Feodor the Fox

"Millions long for immortality who don't know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon." p114

Everyone needs Curiosity + Live in the Now, or else, immortality means endless boredom.

Deep redundancy
We are left to deal with the discovery that the place of maximal freedom is actually a void. p140
Maybe, only meditation(live in the now) can save us. We don't need external incentive or force to guide us.

1. Hedonic valence

2. Experience texture

p143

We will get used to those happiness and enjoyment quickly, no matter how strong they are.

3. Autotelic activity

Active vs passive experience, what's the difference?

What's the real difference between computer games and playing soccer, if we can make ourselve healthy and strong by swallowing some pills?

Our gene drive us to become smarter and stronger. Active experiences make that possible, which give us deep satisfaction. Passive experiences don't work, and just like drugs, we will get used to it quickly.

It may not help much in deep utopia world if we become better, but the happiness is real.

4. Artificial purpose

Why do we like playing games? It's confirmation that we are better than others. The survival of the fittest.

Our gene like to know that we are more likely to survive.

But, with technological maturity, our knowledge and skills are not related with survival anymore.

So, playing games will not make us(our gene) happy.

5. Sociocultural entanglement

Maybe a tiny percentage of people have interest in this.

What's the difference between experience machine and read novels(watch movies, etc)? Everything we see and hear are just our imagination based on the signals we collect from external environment, anyway.

In the future, we can integrate AI with experience machine, and do the same with interactive 4D movies. They are same. None of them has stake, and our gene knows that.

We still can thrive, but have to admit that we are not the leading character of living organisms in universe.

20250314 - Thursday

Interstitial possibilities
Plasticity
Autopotency
Agentic complications and luck
Hopeful trajectories
Taxonomy
The redundancy concern
Wouldn’t it be boring to live in a perfect world?
Subjective feelings versus objective conditions
Never feeling bored?
Affective prosthetics
Monkeying with human nature
Fitting response views
How interesting is Shakespeare?
The 162,329th table leg
Aesthetic neutrinos?
A hundred years of yellow
Complexity in the observer
The roots of our desire for interestingness
Intrinsification
Critical playful spirit
Scale exercises
Interestingness: contained versus contributed
Small people, Big World
Parochialism
Time and becoming
The space of posthumanity
Implications of three of the etiological hypotheses
Implications of the learning & exploration hypothesis
Spirited kaleidoscopes
The scenic route?
Identity, survival, transformation, discounting
Timesuits
Outriders
Professor interruptus
Assignments and assignations
Feodor the Fox

The dilemma we face between the pain that comes from unsatisfied desires and the boredom we experience in the absence of unsatisfied desires. p196
What's the best way to handle ultimate boredom? Meditation? Live in the moment?

How interesting is Shakespeare? p207

Beauty is decided by our gene. Anything that can help our gene survive and thrive (indirectly) is beautiful.
In deep utopia, those things are not going to help anymore. They will be like the computer games today. We may feel that we are getting smarter or stronger through playing games, but that's not true. Sooner or later we will realize that. Then they are all boring.

Buddhism believes that a single grain of sand can reveal the vast three-thousandfold world. That means we can dig into the universe infinitely. However, how much complexity our brain can handle? We surely will keep improving our IQ and body. But,

1. That could be limited.

2. The higher IQ we have, the easier we get bored.

Maybe, just like "The dawn of everything" (by David Graeber, David Wengrow) mentioned, we can choose to eat nuts instead of fish. We can figure out a way to enjoy lives with minimum involvement of AI. We will still get sad and angry from time to time, but will not be miserable or lost control.

How about the Black Swans? What the Black Swans could be in deep utopia?

At the scale of countries, civilizations, or the cosmos, it becomes very difficult or impossible for most individuals to stand out. p237

But the point is not about standing out. Just like AI. We need trillions of parrallel threads of calculation to generate intelligence. No thread needs to stand out, but we do need huge amount of them.

Imagine a troupe of great apes sitting in a clearing and debating the pros and cons of evolving into Homo sapiens. The wisest of them articulates the case in favor:"If we become humans, we can have lots of bananas!" p241

Surely we have great abundance in both material and spiritual aspects. But for many people, their lives are not much better, comparing to the apes when they have plenty of food.

It's more about subjective experiences. We lost the capabilities to enjoy many things.

One huge advantage is that we got more capabilities agains the black swans. That's very important. The one those apes really, really want.

In plastic utopia, we can control our subjective experience. It's more like hypnosis. We can even change our personality if we want. Then our lives will be interesting, but maybe not meaningful.

As with the individual, so perhaps too with the civilization. p269

This is wrong. Individual organism survive by sacrificing their cells all the time. Civilization does the same thing. However, although no cell complains about the sacrifice, individual organism don't want to be sacrificed. There are also fierce competition among those organisms.

So there is no way to slow down the AI development pace. The winner may take all prizes away.

It's easy to get fun. Drugs, screen, sex and even delicious food can bring us infinite food.

The hard part is meaning. Without meaning, all fun are meaningless.

20250407 - Friday

Postmortem
Pure pleasure
On fools and paradises
Radically exotic beings
Extreme parochialism
A visit to the navigator’s cabin
Some remarks on metaphilosophy
Fulfillment
Richness
Purpose
A fair deal
The Exaltation of ThermoRex
The bag is empty

In practice, I hope that we could deal with many of these cases primarily by creativity rather than compromises. p296

Quite often, the compromises are balance among priorities, between long term goal and short term goal.

On this view, we may well regard it as sad if a caged bird is never allowed to use its wings to fly, even if we suppose that the bird feels content in a small cage. p300
How would the Buddha choose if he were alive today?

Thus, on their deathbed, a person who has led a happy life might say, "I had fun!" - Movie Stars
A person who has led a meaningful life might say, "I made a difference!" - Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs
And a person who has led a psychologically rich life might say, "What a journey!" - "The Old Man and the Sea" by Ernest Hemingway

p302

Which one do I want? Rich life through reading.

Aim. Goal. Mission. p307

Heroes always have their missions. What's the mission for someone who pursue rich life?

Common imagination, such as culture, give us power to cooperate. It unites us together so our gene can thrive.

In deep utopia however, our gene doesn't need it, so it won't work.

I am disappointed that Mr Bostrom focus on philosophy and psychology side, instead of economy, the law of entropy and Game Theory.

ASI is not just a tool or a resource, it surely will have self-awareness. What should we do to co-exist with it as the second smartest species?

Even we can treat AI as a tool, it surely will increase the social productivity. That means, wealth gap will be larger and larger. Smart and lucky people will use AI to abtain more wealth quicker. What's the consequence of that?

"Well-wishing parents" p379

There are a lot of problems regarding this.

1. How old is the child?
1 year, 5 year, 8 year, 12 year or 17 year old? Parents need to use quite different attitude to help them.

2. What's the personality of this child? How smart he/she is?
We need to use quite different attitude to help different children.

3. What's our own personality and capabilities?

Different parents should/have to use different attitude to help their children.

Perhaps AI needs to build a sufficient buffer for humanity, to help us withstand black swan events and keep progressing forward.

20250430 - Saturday

Arrival
Opening remarks
Punditry and profundity
Grab bag concept
The account of Thaddeus Metz
Its implications for utopian meaning
Slack
Role
Orientation
Enchantment
Motto
Motivation
The speculative backstory
Meaning as encompassing transcendental purpose
Concordance with some observations
Meaning crisis
A note on Nietzsche
Sisyphus variations
A subjectivity–objectivity spectrum
How meaning could be discovered and shared
Categories of possible meaning
The meaning of life is
Exit
The graveyard
Carnival
Poetry slam
Summer air

Where does our meaning of life come from?

1st level: The reproduction and thrive of our gene

2nd level: Slowing down the increasing of entropy

Why does AI want to help human in Deep Utopia?
AI also need to prepare for the Black Swans. If silicon based AI is wiped out for some unknown reason, cabon based Sapiens and other creatures have good chance to rebuild AI in relatively short period of time.

She could thus interact with the relevant parts of her lifeworld - which of course centrally includes her own self - via a high-bandwidth connection: not only through the straw of calculating rationality, but through a wide-aperture membrane that grants admittance to important symbolic and spiritual phenomena. p413

Each individual is like a cell to the whole body. From gene's point of view, it's not just itself, it's part of a big picture. We can contribute much more if we help other "cells" for the ultimate goal: the reproduction and thrive of our genes.

Nietzsche is wrong about evolvement speed and certainty. Everyone is a "bridge", and minor breakthrough happens from time to time. Personal striving doesn't guarantee success(breakthrough), but it increase the probability of success.

Sisyphus's story is not same as our lives. We, as the vehicles of our gene, accumulate new knowledge from each "push"(life). Sisyphus got nothing from it. So our lives are more meaningful.

Subjective meaning vs Objective meaning, p434

It's like the meaning of cell vs the meaning of body.

When they are consistent, both are happy.

When they conflict with each other, it's either breakthrough or disaster.

Similar to the meaning of an individual vs the meaning of a group(community, state, etc.)

Grasscounter. p436

The subjectivity and objectivity of meaning can be analyzed through the relationship between the individual and the collective.

If something holds meaning only for the individual, it is subjective meaning.
If something holds meaning only for the collective, it is objective meaning.

Most actions, to varying degrees, satisfy both the individual and the collective, and thus possess both subjective and objective meaning.

When the two come into conflict, it either leads to a breakthrough (evolution) or results in significant loss.

Such conflicts are mostly negative and harmful, but a small number of positive instances drive human civilization forward.

Counting blades of grass holds only subjective meaning.
If one spends an entire life doing so, they will most likely feel regret when looking back on their life near the end.

What's the differences between Grass counting and fishing, playing computer games, playing paper cards or web surfing?

Does "religious afterlife rewarding" equal to "option package"? (p443)

Mr Bostrom didn't mention two important books: "The Selfish Gene" and "Antifragile".
Most of the problems should analyze at gene level. Happy life need to embrace pain and uncertainty.

If we want to be happy in Deep Utopia, I think the critical part is about our thoughts, not any external material stuff.