Comment on AI Risk and Opportunity: A Strategic Analysis

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 07:14:38 GMT

Mitchell Porter wrote: "These are all emotional statements that do not stand up to reason."

Dear Mitchell, reason cannot exist without emotion therefore reason must encompass emotion if reason is to be a true analysis of reality. If you completely expunge all memories of emotion, and all the areas of the human brain associated with the creation of emotion, you would have a brain-dead individual or a seriously retarded person, or a catatonic person, who cannot reason. Logic and rationality must therefore encompass emotion. The logical thing is to be aware of your emotions thus your "reason" is not influenced by any unaware bias. The rational way forward is to be aware of your biases. It is not rational to suppress your biases because the suppression does not actually stop the influence of emotion impacting upon your reason, it merely makes your reasoning neurotic, it pushes the biases below your level of awareness, it makes you unaware of how your emotions are altering your perception of reality because you have created a wilful disconnection in your thinking, you are estranged from a key part of yourself: your emotions, but you falsely think you have vanquished your emotions and this gives you a false sense of security which causes you to make mistakes regarding your so-called "rationality".

Mitchell, you criticise my statement as being emotional but are you aware your criticism is emotional. Ironic?

There are many points I want to address regarding your response but in this comment I want to focus on your perception of rationality and emotions. I will however briefly state the growing human population is not a obstacle to scarcity because the universe is a very big place with enough matter and energy to satisfy our wildest dreams. Humans will not be limited to Earth in the future thus Post-Scarcity is possible. We will become a Space-faring species quicker then you think. The Singularity is near.

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