Packy McCormick

More subtly, it could result in a superintelligence realizing a state of affairs that we might now judge as desirable but which in fact turns out to be a false utopia, in which things essential to human flourishing have been irreversibly lost.

People read nonfiction to learn and to feel. My framework for ensuring a blog post accomplishes both is to start with a first draft that focuses on "novel" ideas.

A novel idea is one that's not just new to the reader, but also significant and not easily intuited. Think of it as new and worthwhile . I've identified five categories:

• Counter-intuitive —

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But to Eric Drexler, the author of Nanosystems, nanotechnology doesn't look like carbon nanotubes or killer robots but rather a super-fast 3D printer that could make many non-edible physical products atom by atom.