Bostrom: Technological maturity will enable direct control over mental states
Nick Bostrom · The Path to SuperIntelligence & Escaping the Simulation — With Nick Bostrum · Aug 7, 2024 · at 17:14
Philosopher Nick Bostrom discusses human psychology and fulfillment in a post-AGI 'solved world' where all instrumental tasks are automated.
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“In a solved world, in utopia, the utopians could have, like, extreme levels of motivation and immersion and subjective purpose. That's easy. That's like a check mark. And more broadly, you can go through different plausible human values. And for some of them, you can just right off the bat say, well, yeah, sure. Of course, that would be trivially easy to do in utopia. So in this case, through the psychological engineering techniques that they would have, I mean, already you could have like imagine a drug without side effects and without addiction potential that just induced the state of fascination and motivation. We already have simple versions of that, like, but you could imagine far more sophisticated ways that Would give the utopians, like, very fine-grained direct control over their mental states and their psychology. That would follow from technological maturity.”
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