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How much of a consensus is there though, when as soon as you start digging at the edges, the consensus dissolves? And the edges are boundaries of the pool of th

How much of a consensus is there though, when as soon as you start digging at the edges, the consensus dissolves? And the edges are boundaries of the pool of the experiences we know. What about the experiences we don't know? What if we start considering not only agents with a physical body, but also add a dimension of agents without one (considering that the ways we recognize intelligence in animals is by the way they move)? Then our entire discussion jumps to the border, and the consensus is nowhere to be found, making the heuristic - again - biased towards the familiar. No, I think we need a better heuristic than consensus. The consequences of a bad heuristics are, at best, wasting time, but at worst, pulling the trigger on something heinous because it was insufficiently understood.

YeGoblynQueenne 2y ago
I don't think that hideous things, like eugenics or Nazi racism, happen because of a lack of understanding. They happen because people have their heads up their butts with megalomaniac ideas about the world and their place in it. The "Master Race" was not a misunderstanding, it was some people wanting to be better than everyone else and making up, out of whole cloth -and no empirical evidence at all- that they were. There certainly wasn't universal consensus about it btw, just between Nazis. I agree that there are dangers in trusting consensus as a mechanism for advancement of knowledge, and I see your point about risking losing focus on the border. But I think it is also very important to have a common body of knowledge that we can all agree on. Take flying again: nobody disputes the fact that planes are flying (again, nobody who isn't just being contrary). We can work out the gray areas in time and they don't necessarily make progress impossible. E.g. maybe we can't agree on whether hovercrafts fly, but we can still make them and use them. So there is a limiting effect, like I point out in my other comment, but it is not a hard lock on progress. And I think that avoiding endless philosophical discussions is a big advantage. If there is a better heuristic then I'm happy to embrace it btw. But, is there?
- persnickety 2y ago
  Hideous things can be done by evil people, but also accidentally by well-meaning people when they don't realize what the stakes are. How many people stop being racist only because they leave the environment where racism was prevalent and they get exposed to a different heuristic on human worth? There's a paper discussing heuristics for determining the moral worth (not intelligence) of being which advocates the precautionary principle: http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/AIRights2-180604.htm http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/AIRights2... > avoid acting heinously by the standards of any reasonable ethical principle that draws a significant proportion of well-informed, thoughtful theorists
  - YeGoblynQueenne 2y ago
    Thanks for the link. I generally agree with the premises, though not necessarily the utilitarian treatment. For me it goes without saying that if we create AI's (that we can all agree are) as intelligent as humans we will have to treat them just as we treat humans. Which kind of defeats their purpose: most people who want to create AI think of them as superhuman machine slaves as far as I've seen.

YeGoblynQueenne 2y ago

I don't think that hideous things, like eugenics or Nazi racism, happen because of a lack of understanding. They happen because people have their heads up their butts with megalomaniac ideas about the world and their place in it. The "Master Race" was not a misunderstanding, it was some people wanting to be better than everyone else and making up, out of whole cloth -and no empirical evidence at all- that they were. There certainly wasn't universal consensus about it btw, just between Nazis. I agree that there are dangers in trusting consensus as a mechanism for advancement of knowledge, and I see your point about risking losing focus on the border. But I think it is also very important to have a common body of knowledge that we can all agree on. Take flying again: nobody disputes the fact that planes are flying (again, nobody who isn't just being contrary). We can work out the gray areas in time and they don't necessarily make progress impossible. E.g. maybe we can't agree on whether hovercrafts fly, but we can still make them and use them. So there is a limiting effect, like I point out in my other comment, but it is not a hard lock on progress. And I think that avoiding endless philosophical discussions is a big advantage. If there is a better heuristic then I'm happy to embrace it btw. But, is there?

persnickety 2y ago
Hideous things can be done by evil people, but also accidentally by well-meaning people when they don't realize what the stakes are. How many people stop being racist only because they leave the environment where racism was prevalent and they get exposed to a different heuristic on human worth? There's a paper discussing heuristics for determining the moral worth (not intelligence) of being which advocates the precautionary principle: http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/AIRights2-180604.htm http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/AIRights2... > avoid acting heinously by the standards of any reasonable ethical principle that draws a significant proportion of well-informed, thoughtful theorists
- YeGoblynQueenne 2y ago
  Thanks for the link. I generally agree with the premises, though not necessarily the utilitarian treatment. For me it goes without saying that if we create AI's (that we can all agree are) as intelligent as humans we will have to treat them just as we treat humans. Which kind of defeats their purpose: most people who want to create AI think of them as superhuman machine slaves as far as I've seen.