Eugene Leitl writes,
> You can't reciprocate to a god in any meaningful way. Tell me why a
> god should consider us anything else than a feature of the landscape?
With our prosthetic limbs, titanium hips, and artificial eyes, we are already
beginning to resemble our machines. A hybrid species of human and robot with
intelligence vastly superior to that of purely biological mankind is what many
extropy-oriented thinkers envision.
"Nanobot technology will provide fully immersive, totally convincing virtual
reality in the following way. The nanobots take up positions close to every
interneuronal connection coming from all of our biological sensory receptors
(e.g., eyes, ears, skin). We already have technology for electronic devices to
communicate with neurons in both directions that requires no direct physical
contact with the neurons. For example, scientists at the Max Planck Institute in
Heidelberg, Germany, have developed "neuron transistors" that can detect the
firing of a nearby neuron, or alternatively, can cause a nearby neuron to fire
or suppress it from firing. This amounts to two-way communication between
neurons and the electronic-based neuron transistors." --Ray Kurzweil
When I become a god (or when you do), why should I (or you) consider those who
have not done so as anything else than a feature of the landscape? Because godly
intelligence includes compassion. In fact, as Jiddu Krishnamurti has pointed
out, fully mature intelligence does not exist without compassion.
A god must be sane. A synthetic god must have synthetic sanity. High-quality
sanity would (in contrast to low-quality sanity) exhibit robust adaptability and
resilience. In addition, it would tolerate exposure to various chemical and
physiological insults as well as intense stimulation via sensory input (and
sensory deprivation).
An AI would want to be friendly because that's the sane thing to do. So, what do
we mean by sanity?
The need to define sanity indicates a desire to prove ourselves sane.
But the whole history of humanity proves that humanity lacks sanity as much
as it lacks anything. Basically, humanity proves itself insane by fighting
five thousand wars in the last three thousand years. The greed, jealousy,
and selfishness that prevails throughout human social orders indicates the
dominance of something other than sanity.
Sane people exult in doing what comes naturally, in satisfying a congenital
appetite for the beauty of reason, the thrill of understanding, the
excitement of knowing reality directly.
A wise man once defined sanity as "coming out of the mind into the open,
into the silence, where no thought, no desire disturbs you. In that pool of
silence, with not a single ripple upon it, sanity abides."
Sanity means to secure your happiness, and by extension, the happiness of
your neighbors, family, friends, and community, since one cannot really feel
happy when surrounded by misery.
When your means fulfill your ends, if you can manage that -- the harmony
between the means and the end -- then you've got sanity. When your means
don't satisfy your end, and you continue to repeat the same means, never
arriving at a gratifying end, then you've got a neurosis. "Make every act of
your life dedicated to love and sanity arises out of it," a romantic man has
said.
When liberated people want to play the game of sanity, they live as sanely
as anyone can live. Then they can outdo Aristotle with logic and reason.
They can follow every rule and regulation. But if they want to play the
lunatic game, then they can become as demagogic, theologic, and ideologic as
any other maniac.
The perfectly sane brain thinks only when necessary. It reverts to ecstatic
tranquility (i.e., it allows thought-noise to dissipate, clearing the way
for the emergence of superlative sentience or learning) whenever it can, for
as long as it can. Conversely, the insane brain cannot stop chattering.
A psychologist asked a psychonomer, "How do you deal with neurotics?"
The psychonomer replied, "We trap them?"
"Oh? And how do you do that?" asked the psychologist.
"By making it impossible for them to ask any more questions," answered the
psychonomer.
Do you think it is sanity when half the human race is dying of starvation? You
ask why a god should consider us anything else than a feature of the landscape.
Yet *we* consider half the human race a feature of the landscape! What you're
doing is projecting your own callous attitude onto the AI. Don't make the AI so
cheap! Don't sell the AI short. With its greater intelligence will come greater
compassion, and therefore greater sanity.
With the amplified intelligence of AI/SI comes liberating truth. Meditate on
these things, and discover that creativity, compassion, consciousness, and
especially sanity accompany vastly expanded intelligence. Otherwise, it is
lunacy to even think of evolving an AI. From crazed and callous computer
scientists comes crazed and callous AI.
The reason we ask why an AI would want to be friendly is that we are not sure
why *we* would want to be friendly. As the friendliness of the extropy e-mail
list increases, so too will our confidence increase in the friendliness of the
AI.
--J. R.
"It's haughty of us to think we're the end product of evolution. All of us are a
part of producing whatever is coming next. We're at an exciting time. We're
close to the singularity. Go back to that litany of chemistry leading to
single-celled organisms, leading to intelligence. The first step took a billion
years, the next step took a hundred million, and so on. We're at a stage where
things change on the order of decades, and it seems to be speeding up.
Technology has the autocatalytic effect of fast computers, which let us design
better and faster computers faster. We're heading toward something which is
going to happen very soon -- in our lifetimes -- and which is fundamentally
different from anything that's happened in human history before."
--W. Daniel Hillis
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Oct 02 2000 - 17:39:11 MDT