Honestly, I would moderate society with more positive religious elements. In my opinion modern society has preserved many dysfunctional elements of religion while abandoning the functional benefits. I can see that a community of rationalists would have a problem with this perspective, seeing that religion almost always results in an undereducated majority being enchanted by their psychological reflexes; but personally, I don’t see the existence of an irrational mass as unconditionally detrimental.

It is interesting to speculate about the potential of a majorly rational society, but I see no practical method of accomplishing this, nor a reason to believe that, I see no real reason to believe that if there was such a configuration would necessarily be superior to the current model.

Either swimmer or Dave, are either of you aware of a practical methodology for rationalizing the masses, or a reason to think why a more efficient society would be any less oppressive or war driven. In fact, in a worst case scenario, I see a world of majorly rational people as transforming into an even more efficient war machine, and killing us all faster. As for the project of pursuit of Friendly AI, I do not know that much about it. What is the perceived end goal of friendly Ai? Is it that an unbiased, unfailing intelligence replaces humans as the primary organizers and arbiters of power in our society, or is it that humanity itself is digitized? I would be very interested to know…without being told to read an entire tome of LW essays.