5 ms·
I think a society must first define their values before trying to align to them. Elimination of pain and suffering as a primary value, changes everything. A su
by jl2718 5y ago
I think a society must first define their values before trying to align to them.
Elimination of pain and suffering as a primary value, changes everything. A superintelligent overlord given that objective would simply eliminate all life on earth. If preservation of life was a value, it would sterilize everything and put all existing life in a coma. If the objective was happiness, it would drug us during the coma.
But it would not be so dumb as to choose those things. I don’t know what it would choose exactly, but, I think it would have something to do with the purpose of life itself in this universe, which can be seen as a fundamental force to fight entropy at the mesoscale between electromagnetism and gravity.
- nsonha 5y agoYour logic has the comlexity of that from comic book characters. Brainiac or ultron? Cmon!
- jl2718 5y agoI have never read a comic book. Maybe I should start. Is there one you would suggest?
- dalbasal 5y ago"A society must" in what sense? Some, mostly modern, societies (eg constitutions) sometimes do "define their values" but rarely in the way that you mean. IE, they're defined in regular human terms like justice and stuff. No society that I know of "defines its values" in terms of uber abstract principles that everything else is derivative of. Some, mostly modernist, occasionally platonist philosophers try to do this... but thats a philosophical exercise. The way societies actually work is that we have values, because people have values. We rationalise, abstract, deconstruct, cross reference, expand, contract, torture, abandon, repurpose, revise and revisit those values in a never ending process. That is, in fact, what society is. What you are describing is asimov computer code.