We split hard problems into smaller parts, and use goal-trees, plans, and context stacks to help us keep making progress.
We develop ways to control our minds with all sorts of incentives, threats, and bribes.
We have many different ways to learn, and also can learn new ways to learn.
We can often postpone a dangerous action and imagine, instead, what its outcome might be in some Virtual World.
Our language and culture accumulates vast stores of ideas that were discovered by our ancestors. We represent these in multiple realms, with metaphors interconnecting them.
Most every process in the brain is linked to some other processes. So, while any particular process may have some deficiencies, there frequently will be other parts that can intervene to compensate.
Nevertheless, our brains still have bugs. Similarly, in the coming decades of research toward Artificial Intelligence, every system that we build will keep showing unexpected flaws. In some cases, we’ll be able to diagnose specific errors in those designs, and hence be able to correct them. But when we can find no such simple fix, then we will be forced instead to evolve increasingly complex systems in which each process needs to be supervised by various Critics. [edit] And through all this, we can never expect to find any foolproof strategy to balance the advantage of immediate action against the benefit of more careful, reflective thought. Whatever we do, we can be sure that the road toward designing ‘post-human minds’ will be rough.
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[Ref. To Memes?]
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