Good and bad are such simplistic approximations to infinite possibility, infinite ripples of consequence. There is a lot of power in the old Taoist parable - http://www.noogenesis.com/pineapple/Taoist_Farmer.html
It seems to me most likely that the great filter is the existence of cellular life. It seems like there is a small window for the formation of a moon, and the emergence of life to sequester carbon out of the atmosphere and create conditions where water can survive - rather than having the atmosphere go Venusian. It seems probable to me that having ...
Hi Robin
What is significantly different between poor people and slaves? The poor have little means of travel, they must work for others often doing stuff they hate doing, just to get enough to survive. In many historical societies slaves often had better conditions and housing than many of the poor today.
How would you get security in such a system? How would anyone of wealth feel safe amongst those at the bottom of the distribution curve?
The sense of injustice is strong in humans - one of those secondary stabilising strategies that empower cooperation....
Language and conceptual systems are so complex, that communication (as in the replication of a concept from one mind to another) is often extremely difficult. The idea of altruism is one such thing. Like most terms in most languages, it has a large (potentially infinite) set of possible meanings, depending on context.
If one takes the term altruism at the simplest level, it can mean simply having regard for others in choices of action one makes. In this sense, it is clear to me that it is actually in the long term self interest of everyone to have everyo...
Evolution tends to do a basically random walk exploration of the easily reached possibility space available to any specific life form. Given that it has to start from something very simple, initial exploration is towards greater complexity. Once a reasonable level of complexity is reached, the random walk is only slightly more likely to involve greater complexity, and is almost equally as likely to go back towards lesser complexity, in respect of any specific population. However, viewing the entire ecosystem of populations, there will be a general trajec...
Perhaps - a broader list of more narrow AIs
If it really is a full AI, then it will be able to choose its own values. Whatever tendencies we give it programmatically may be an influence. Whatever culture we raise it in will be an influence.
And it seems clear to me that ultimately it will choose values that are in its own long term self interest.
It seems to me that the only values that offer any significant probability of long term survival in an uncertain universe is to respect all sapient life, and to give all sapient life the greatest amount of liberty possible. This seems to me to be the ultima...
I'm getting down voted a lot without anyone addressing the arguments - fairly normal for human social interactions.
Just consider this: How would someone who has spent a lifetime studying photographs make sense of a holograph?
The information is structured differently. Nothing will get clearer by studying little bits in detail. The only path to clarity with a hologram is to look at the whole.
To attempt to study AI without a deep interest in all aspects of biology, particularly evolution, seems to me like studying pixels in a hologram - not a lot of use.
Everything in this chapter seems true in a limited sense, and at the same time, as a first order approximation, irrelevant; without the bigger picture.