I hesitate to bet in markets that are obviously farcical when this website consists of so many rationalists, however "filling the lightcone with heroin brains should be humanity's ultimate goal" is too vapid to not to bet against

@brubsby How is it more "vapid" than any other longtermist goal? It seems to me to be the logical conclusion of the utilitarian maxim "the greatest happiness for the greatest number"

if so, why aren't we all dissolving ourselves in pools of heroin?

@Stralor Opioids aren’t really that great, at least to me.

@Stralor wait until elon makes the killer app of Neuralink be on demand orgasms.

@Stralor Because opiate addicion ultimately leads to more pain than pleasure in almost every case?

This seems conditional on an awful lot of things. I vote against it because my guess is any machine powerful enough to enforce its singular will across the cosmos like that will probably have to have simple reproduction of itself as its ultimate goal - anything 'extra' like trying to optimize for building brains would put it at a disadvantage to another machine which has no such additional goal.

Now whether those two goals are one and the same... I think you'd have to ask an ontologist about that. That's some hardcore speculative stuff.

I think it's self-evident that this should be the ultimate end of any utilitarian system, and therefore that it's what humanity or rational superintelligences created by humanity will eventually carry out.