Should transhumanist attempt to engage the public in discussion of our predictions for the future? Some people argue that we shouldn't.

"Danger of regulations" view

by Russel Wallace

Conversely, my view - which seems to be in a minority on these forums - is that nanotech etc are not imminent ... they are things that may be achieved in the distant future if steady and rapid progress can be maintained for sufficiently many generations; this is why I get frustrated with apocalyptic predictions, because if the real, very early stage research being done today gets politically lumped in with hydrogen bombs, we may never get anywhere near making any of it actually work.

It occurs to me that our best hope might end up being a rerun of the AI winter and dot-com bubble: the rising trend of hysteria continues for a couple of decades, then when nothing happens everyone goes away disappointed, leaving real research to continue undisturbed (albeit with reduced funding) for the requisite century or however long it takes to get to the point where something whose regulation is worth debating actually exists. The main thing I'd be afraid of in that scenario is that regulations may be enacted during the hysteria phase, because bureaucracy once in place takes on a life of its own - it doesn't go away.

"Useless, they still talk about the present" view

Robin Hanson

I'd guess it is more like a half century rather than several centuries, but otherwise I agree. While in principle a rational public discourse could benefit from advanced warning of future disruptions, in practice public discussions of distant future technologies seem to become symbolic battlegrounds for expressing ideologies and current concerns. People don't seem to talk about such issues as if they really believed they would personally live with the consequences. So unless there is a strong reason to need to deal with a problem well in advance, we might do better to wait for public discussion until a problem starts to reveal itself more directly. Also there is the huge opportunity cost of a public distracted from current concerns.

Of course some of us should be thinking about the future now, searching for problems we might much better avoid if we start dealing with them now, or opportunities that can be much better exploited if we start working on them now. Alas, those who do think about the future now rarely seem to focus on identifying such leverage points. So I encourage folks to call extra attention to them when they are found.

Encouraging people to diversify their portfolios to insure against falling wages would help to deal with an upload transition, but since there are other cruder ways to deal with this problem later, even here I'm not sure it is worth bringing this problem to public attention now.