Oliver studied physics, neuroscience, philosophy and law at the University of Melbourne in Australia including a semester abroad at the Paris Institute of Political Studies. His writings have appeared in Areo and Quillette, often focusing on the ideas driving and hindering human progress – scientific, technological, moral and economic. His thinking is heavily inspired by the works of Karl Popper and David Deutsch, and he is currently exploring the plausibility of transitioning our minds into artificial substrates in a way that preserves our conscious personal identities and helps us keep up with any pesky artificial super-intelligences we create. Oliver is based in Melbourne where he enjoys playing tennis and acquiescing to the relentless demands of his dear cat, Cecil. He tweets at @olliewaters and blogs on Medium. Email: oc.waters [at] gmail.com
by Oliver Waters The Matrix films depict a future dystopia in which oppressive super-intelligent machines have imprisoned human beings inside an entirely simulated world in order to exploit them as a power source. The human protagonists of the films – Neo and Trinity – lead a thrilling rebellion to free as many people as possible.…
by Oliver Waters In last month’s column I criticised the ‘degrowth’ movement, which essentially proposes that we should produce and consume less stuff. This notion has some merit of course – we should always strive to ‘do more with less’ – if that simply means making our technologies more efficient. But the degrowth ideology also…
by Oliver Waters In the final moments of the film Don’t Look Up (2021), a group of family and friends sit around a dinner table laughing together while enjoying some delicious organic produce. Leonardo DeCaprio looks up from his heirloom tomatoes with nostalgic despair. ‘We really did have everything, didn’t we?’ he laments, just before…
by Oliver Waters Two popular books released this year have breathed new life into the ancient debate over whether we have free will. In Free Agents, Kevin Mitchell argues that we do, and in Determined, Robert Sapolsky argues that we don’t. To be blunt, on the big issue at hand – Mitchell is right and…
by Oliver Waters If you were a medieval peasant in the year 1323 AD, would you have believed that slavery was morally permissible? The odds are that you would have. After all, most people at the time saw slavery as a permanent fact of life, not an abomination that ought to be abolished. But it’s…
by Oliver Waters In Part I, we explored some immediate benefits of transitioning from our organic brains to synthetic ones, perhaps the most attractive being effective immortality via ‘backing up’ our digital minds. But now I’d like to venture off into much more speculative territory: how artificial brains may enable us to meet aliens. People…
by Oliver Waters Part I of this series argued that transferring your personal identity to an artificial brain should be possible. It’s one thing however to preserve the informational content of your identity, and quite another for that content to be conscious. It would be a real shame if your new artificial self was getting…
by Oliver Waters The first article of this series argued that in principle we should expect our personal identities to survive a transition to artificial brains. Obviously there remains the minor technical problem of how to actually build such brains. The most popular conception of how to approach this is known as ‘whole brain emulation’,…
by Oliver Waters Panic about runaway artificial super-intelligence spiked recently, with doomsayers like Eliezer Yudkowsy prophesising that, if current progress continues, literally everyone on Earth will die. In a way, he’s right. Humanity will probably die out as technology progresses, but not quite in the depressing way he imagines. ‘Humanity’ after all, refers to two…