Juan Orbea

A more controversial application than this scanning-the-brain-to-understand-it scenario is scanning-the-brain-to-download-it. When an entire network of neurons receives input (from the outside world or from other networks of neurons), the signaling amongst them appears at first to be frenzied and random. So the question addressed by the San Diego... See more

Traditional philosophy has been going on almost three thousand years; machine goal alignment has until the advent of superintelligence, a nebulous event which may be anywhere from a decades to centuries away. If the control problem doesn’t get adequately addressed by then, we are likely to see poorly controlled superintelligences that are... See more

"On or about December 1910 human character changed," Virginia Woolf famously declared. Gone, she wrote, were the old certainties, the old manners, the deference to nineteenth-century authority. Instead human beings—at least the ones in Woolf's circle—were starting to see the world as full of chaos and discontinuity. Einstein smashed the notion of... See more

Generally, I am used to the Big Compromise Idea being a leftist one: some form of equality and democracy. Balaji, on the other hand, has Big Compromise Ideas that feel more rightist: local communities with shared values, loyalty, religion, physical environments structured to encourage personal discipline ("keto kosher") and hard work. 

The truly interesting stuff is the governance innovation: using network states to organize in ways that would actually not be possible under existing regulations. 

Eventually, as the negative consequences of the financial crisis played its way out, and say, all the banks disappeared, some kind of new approach (e.g. Google innovating an entirely new way of handling banking) or the emergence of an entirely different regime, would have come into place, and we would have moved forward effectively with no damage... See more