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.
Mitchell, you criticise my statement as being emotional but are you aware your criticism is emotional. Ironic?
I criticise your statements as unrealistic, wrong, or dogmatic. Calling them emotional is just a way of keeping in view your reasons for making them. I have read your site now so I know this is all about bringing hope to the world, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy, and so on. So here are some more general criticisms.
The promise that "scarcity" will "soon" be abolished doesn't offer hope to anyone except people who are em...
Suppose you buy the argument that humanity faces both the risk of AI-caused extinction and the opportunity to shape an AI-built utopia. What should we do about that? As Wei Dai asks, "In what direction should we nudge the future, to maximize the chances and impact of a positive intelligence explosion?"
This post serves as a table of contents and an introduction for an ongoing strategic analysis of AI risk and opportunity.
Contents:
Why discuss AI safety strategy?
The main reason to discuss AI safety strategy is, of course, to draw on a wide spectrum of human expertise and processing power to clarify our understanding of the factors at play and the expected value of particular interventions we could invest in: raising awareness of safety concerns, forming a Friendly AI team, differential technological development, investigating AGI confinement methods, and others.
Discussing AI safety strategy is also a challenging exercise in applied rationality. The relevant issues are complex and uncertain, but we need to take advantage of the fact that rationality is faster than science: we can't "try" a bunch of intelligence explosions and see which one works best. We'll have to predict in advance how the future will develop and what we can do about it.
Core readings
Before engaging with this series, I recommend you read at least the following articles:
Example questions
Which strategic questions would we like to answer? Muehlhauser (2011) elaborates on the following questions:
Salamon & Muehlhauser (2013) list several other questions gathered from the participants of a workshop following Singularity Summit 2011, including:
These are the kinds of questions we will be tackling in this series of posts for Less Wrong Discussion, in order to improve our predictions about which direction we can nudge the future to maximize the chances of a positive intelligence explosion.