Below is the list of things which in my view could affect the wellbeing of all people, but which is not part of known to me research in EA. As I found these topics important but underexplored I naturally tried my best to look as deep as I can into them, so many of the suggested below ideas have links to my works.
- Use the Moon as a data storage about humanity. This data could be used by the next civilization on Earth and will help it to escape global catastrophes or even will help it to resurrect humans.
- Explore the dangers of passive SETI. We could download dangerous alien AI. See also a recent post by Matthew Barnett.
- Study of UAP and their relation to our future prospects and global risks.
- Plastination as an alternative to cryonics. Some forms of chemical preservation are much cheaper than cryonics and do not require maintenance.
- Prove that death is bad (from the preferential utilitarianism point of view), and thus we need to fight aging, strive for immortality and research the ways to resurrect the dead (unpublished working draft).
- Research the topic of so-called “quantum immortality”. Will it cause eternal sufferings to anyone, or it could be used to increase one's chances of immortality?
- Explore the ways how to resurrect the dead.
- New approaches to digital immortality and life-logging which is the cheapest way to immortality available to everyone. Explore active self-description as an alternative to life-logging.
- Explore how to “cure” past sufferings. Past sufferings are bad. If we have a time machine, it could be used to save past minds from sufferings. But also, we can save them by creating indexical uncertainty about their location, which will work similarly to a time-machine.
- Global chemical contamination as an x-risk. Seems to be underexplored.
- Anthropic effects of the expected probability of runaway global warming: our world is more fragile than we think and thus climate catastrophe is more probable. Unpublished draft.
- Plan B in AI safety. Let’s speak seriously about AI boxing and the best ways to do it.
- Dig deeper into the acausal deals and messaging to any future AI. The utility of killing humans is small for advanced superintelligent AI and adding any small value to our existence can help.
- How the future nuclear war will be different from the 20s century nuclear war scenarios?
- Explore and create refuges to survive a global catastrophe on an island or in a submarine. Create a general overview of surviving options. Surviving in caves. Surviving moisture greenhouse (unpublished draft).
- How to survive the end of the universe. We may have to make important choices before we start space colonization.
- Simulation: Experimental and theoretical research. Explore simulation termination risks. Explore types of evidence that we are in a simulation and analyze the topic of so-called “glitches in the matrix” – are they the evidence that we are in the simulation?
- Psychology of human values: do they actually exist as a stable set of preferences and what does psychology tell us about that?
- Doomsday argument: what if it is true after all? What can be done to escape its prediction?
- Explore the risks of wireheading as a possible cause of the civilizational decline.
Could you elaborate why we have to make choices before space colonisation if we want to survive beyond the end of the last stars? Until now, my opinion is that we can can "start solving heat death" a billion years in the future while we have to solve AI alignment in the next 50 - 1000 years.
Another thought of mine is that it is probably impossible to resurrect the dead by computing how the state of each neuron of a deceased person was at the time of her/his death. I think, you need to measure the state of each particle in the present with a very high precision and/or the computational requirements for a backward simulation are much too high. Unfortunately, I cannot provide a detailed mathematical argument. This would be an interesting research project; even if the only outcome is that a small group of people should change their cause area.
If we start space colonisation, we may not be able to change goal-system of the spaceships that we will send to stars, as they will move away with near-light speed. So we need to specify what we will do with the universe before starting the space colonisation: either we will spend all resources to build as many simulations with happy minds as possible – or we will reorganise matter in the ways with will help to survive the end of the universe, e.g. building Tipler's Omega point or building worm hole into another universe.
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Very high precision of brain details is not needed for resurrection as we every second forget our mind state. So only a core of long-term memory is sufficient to preserve what I call "information identity", which is necessary conditions for a person to regard himself as the same person, say, next day. But the whole problem of identity is not solved yet, and it would be a strong EA cause to solve it: we want to help people in the ways which will not destroy their personal identity, if that identity really matters.
Thank you for your answers. With better brain preservation and a more detailed understanding of the mind it may be possible to resurrect recently deceased persons. I am more skeptical about the possibility to resurrect a peasant from the middle ages by simulating the universe backwards, but of course these are different issues.
If we simulate all possible universes, we can do it. It is enormous computational task, but it can be done via acausal cooperation between different branches of multiverse, where each of them simulate only one history.
I see two problems with your proposal:
I am not against your ideas, but I am afraid that there are many conceptual and physical problems that have to solved before. What is even worse is that there is no universally accepted method how to resolve this issues. So a lot of further research is necessary.
1.The identity problems is known to be difficult, but here I assume that continuity of consciousness is not needed for it. Only informational identity is enough.
2. The difference between quantum - or big world- immortality is that we can select which minds to create and exclude N+1 moments which are damages or suffering.
Let us assume that a typical large but finite volume contains n happy simulations of you and n⋅10−100 suffering copies of you, maybe Boltzmann brains or simulations made by a malevolent agent. If the universe is infinite, you have infinitely many happy and infinitely suffering copies of you and it is hard how to interpret this result.
I think that there is way to calculate relative probabilities even in infinite case and it will converge to 1:1⋅10−100. For example, there is an article "The watchers of multiverse" which suggest a plausible way to do so.
Thank you for the link to the paper. I find Alexander Vilenkins theoretical work very interesting.