Peter Thiel on X-Risks, Singularity, H+ Thursday, May 1 2008
interviews 6:48 am
Interview with Ron Bailey at Reason. This is from last September. Excerpt:
Reason: Why are you supporting the Singularity Institute?
Thiel: I think it’s a group of really smart people working on an important problem. I think that the basic rule on philanthropy that I have is that I want to donate money to causes that are worthwhile but where there are no market-based mechanisms for them. There is a category of things that would benefit all of humanity but where the benefits are very diffuse and the costs are concentrated. Maybe it’s very long-term. So I focused my philanthropy on things with a 20-, 30-, 40-year horizon. The horizons are too long for a for-profit company to take advantage of, and the government and universities are not pushing things because maybe it’s too unconventional or it doesn’t easily fit into a particular political agenda or vision of the future. Those areas are probably systematically underfunded. It may be the only area of philanthropy that’s underfunded.
I have always thought this way about philanthropy. In economic terms, I think that money given to charity (or any non-profit venture) should produce more benefits then it costs. This seems a given; but people are so rapped up in people’s intentions that the consequences of their actions are rarely considered.
Case and point; philanthropy should be effective.
Personally I think imagination is our best help, some technologies that I would like to be funded by philantropy:
1) nanomedicine for cryonics
2) whole body vitrification
3) cyborg/bionics research
4) internet/web services
5) new science fiction ideas
6) infinite powered battery
7) A strong Fab@Home
8) General Robots, General AI
9) Augmented Intelligence
10) Space Colonization
11) Solipsism
12) Bioinformatics and Simulation
Not needed. DARPA’s already funding that //HEAVILY//.
Reword that one — it smacks of perpetual motionism. If you merely mean storage, then yeah — that’d be nice. But there’s physical limits that make it infeasible. You’d be better off developing a device that created a stable microscopic spatial distortion that connected to a large-scale stellar mass and continuously fed in mass to it via a variant membrane where the proton is a non-viable particle. This is as close to an outright defiance of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics as you are ever going to get while at the same time providing for a hand-held device that can channel megawatts of power. It’s also purely fictional at this point — not even really theoretical. Too many “ifs”.
then if we have no such technology we are confined in our solar system trying to make our sun immortal.
Interstellar travel is possible even without magic energy sources; and if we take apart the sun, we can make it alone last a very long time.
I’m curious: why solipsism?
“6) infinite powered battery”
– This technology is potentially very dangerous. Imagine if you accidentally short circuited it! (for example the air between the two terminals would short circuit it). With an infinite power rating, it would destroy the entire planet in an instant. BOOM!
I suppose this (somewhat whimsical) idea is a good example of “be careful what you wish for”. Someone asks for an infinitely powerful battery because it annoys them when their phone runs out of energy. But, were their wish to be granted, it would actually be a disaster, unless very carefully managed. I would want a material with infinitely high resistance before I took delivery of that infinite powered battery…
It reminds me of the problem one faces with superintelligence. I want a superintelligent AGI as much as the next poor sentient soul walking around in a slowly expiring pile of meat, but rather like the “infinite powered battery”, it would probably lead to instant death unless you had taken some very careful precautions. What is the analogue of the material with infinitely high resistance?
aspiring millionaires and billionaires take note