David Chalmers tells us how computers will eclispe is in the future – aka where do these people get this stuff? Philosophy as fan servce.

Prashnath Ramakrishna interviews David Chalmers for the NYTimes:

D.C.: Deep learning is great for things we do perceptually as human beings — image recognition, speech recognition and so on. But when it comes to anything requiring autonomy, reasoning, decisions, creativity and so on, A.I. is only good in limited domains. It’s pretty good at playing games like Go. The moment you get to the real world, though, things get complicated. There are a lot of mountains we need to climb before we get to human-level A.G.I. That said, I think it’s going to be possible eventually, say in the 40-to-100-year time frame.

Once we have a human-level artificial intelligence, there’s just no doubt that it will change the world. A.G.I.s are going to be beings with powers initially equivalent to our own and before long much greater than our own. [...]

I value human history and selfishly would like it to be continuous with the future. How much does it matter that our future is biological? At some point I think we must face the fact that there are going to be many faster substrates for running intelligence than our own. If we want to stick to our biological brains, then we are in danger of being left behind in a world with superfast, superintelligent computers. Ultimately, we’d have to upgrade.

The other way it could go is that new artificial intelligences take over the world and there’s no place for humanity. Maybe we’re relegated to some virtual world or some designated part of the physical world. But you’re right, it would be a second-class existence. At the very least maybe they keep us around as pets or for entertainment or for history’s sake. That would be a depressing outcome. Maybe they’d put us in virtual worlds, we’d never know, and we’d forget all this stuff. Maybe it’s already happened and we’re living in one of those virtual worlds now. Hey, it’s not so bad.

I suppose he really believes this. But why? This is just an interview. No doubt he's run over this ground in greater rigor in some of his publications, as have many others. But how much rigor is possible with this kind of material. Not much, not much at all. It's mostly fantasy. And he's mostly playing to his fans.

And then there's the idea that we're all living in a simulation:

D.C.: This goes back a long way in the history of philosophy. René Descartes said, “How do you know you’re not being fooled by an evil demon right now into thinking this is real when none of it’s real?” Descartes’ evil-demon question is kind of like the question of a virtual reality. The modern version of it is, “How do you know you’re not in the matrix? How do you know you’re not in a computer simulation where all this seems real but none of it is real?” It’s easy for even a movie like “The Matrix” to pump the intuition in you that “this is evil. This isn’t real. No, this is all fake.”

The view that virtual reality isn’t real stems from an outmoded view of reality. In the Garden of Eden, we thought that there was a primitively red apple embedded in a primitive space and everything is just as it seems to be. We’ve learned from modern science that the world isn’t really like that. A color is just a bunch of wavelengths arising from the physical reflectance properties of objects that produce a certain kind of experience in us. Solidity? Nothing is truly solid out there in the world. Things are mostly empty space, but they have the causal powers to produce in us the experience of solidity. Even space and time are gradually being dissolved by physics, or at least being boiled down to something simpler.

Physical reality is coming to look a lot like virtual reality right now. You could take the attitude, “So much the worse for physical reality. It’s not real.” But I think, no. It turns out we just take all that on board and say, “Fine, things are not the way we thought, but they’re still real.” That should be the right attitude toward virtual reality as well. Code and silicon circuitry form just another underlying substrate for reality. Is it so much worse to be in a computer-generated reality than what contemporary physics tells us? Quantum wave functions with indeterminate values? That seems as ethereal and unsubstantial as virtual reality. But hey! We’re used to it.

P.R.: I’m wondering whether it’s useful to say that virtual reality isn’t simply an alternate reality but is rather a sub-reality of the one we normally occupy.

D.C.: That I think is fair. It’s kind of a multiverse. None of this is saying there’s no objective reality. Maybe there’s an objective cosmos encompassing everything that exists. But maybe there’s a level-one cosmos and people create simulations and virtual realities within it. Maybe sometimes there are simulations within simulations. Who knows how many levels there are?

I once speculated that we’re at level 42. Remember that in “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” they programmed a computer to find the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, everything. Then, after years, the computer said, “The answer is 42.” What question could possibly be important enough that this could be the ultimate question and the answer could be a simple number? Well, maybe the question was “What level of reality are we at?”

More fan service.