Should humanity be unified under a single government?
Should humanity be unified under a single government? Why or why not? If you were required to set up this government, what kind of government would you create? What threats to sustainability would arise and how would you deal with them? I'd love to hear anyone's thought on this.
Comments (194)
Transparency and accountability, best defense against the tyrannical and beastly abomination that is unrestrained human nature with all it's greed and indifference.
Besides, we can see how even a national government can be corrupt and evil. Imagine the havoc and destruction that an evil world government might inflict on humanity!
Personally, I would start with a national government run by well-trained and well-behaved philosophers, give it 50-100 years and if that worked out then I might just consider it. And, ideally, it should be a Christian one. I don't think I'd fancy the idea of a worldwide Islamic State to be honest.
I don't believe global government is viable because the distance between government and governed would be too great. Perceived legitimacy of government lies in government being seen to identify with, and represent the interests of the governed. Global government would be alien to all - and even though, I believe that in fact, human beings are all members of the same species, we are evolved, and so beholden to traditional, cultural ideas from which we draw our identities. We do not identify as a species, and so cannot be governed as a species. It is not however necessary to a sustainable future, that we are! We would need global cooperation, but only on the application of specific technologies.
That's a good point. I think if we look at China's treatment of Tibetans, Uighurs and other ethnic groups, some humans regard others as a different species to be either dominated or wiped out. A world government controlled by China would definitely be against the interests of other nations and, probably, even against the interests of Chinese people.
Quoting Marigold23
I left an opening to explain to Marigold, had she asked - that the degree of global cooperation necessary to a sustainable future is actually quite narrow, and specific, if we cooperate in harnessing limitless energy from magma to tackle climate change by producing clean electricity, and extracting carbon from the atmosphere - nations need not agree to impose crippling taxes, swinging cuts and drastic transformations at home to achieve climate benefits. Nor, indeed, have such measures imposed upon them by global government!
Hey Outlander, thanks for the response,
These are good points
Yes, a system of separate nations was sustainable...even beneficial, as a way for civilization to experience evolution through turmoil rather than total destruction... war was also sustainable as odd as that sounds... a fight between Medieval Britain and France did not threaten the actual survival of humans
but the individual governments are growing
There will be a war. I know its a cliche to say that but think about this trend over time... let's be generous and say this era of peace after WWI and WWII will continue for another 76 years... lets make it 100 (unlikely)
How confident should we be that after a century no superpower has even once used the full extent of it's military might in defense or offense against another superpower...?
And
How confident should we be that the full might of one superpower exercised in a war effort 100 years from now (let alone two or three of them) will not either result in some victors empire built on bones such as Hitler nearly built 80 years ago, or a total destruction of humanity by nuclear holocaust, (or by the utilization of some much worse weaponry to be built years from now)... as "sci fi" as that might sound, people would have laughed if you predicted the level of devastation which we would invent with the atomic bomb...
And consider in what area of technology governments will invest the most time, effort, and resources over these 100 years (at their current rate which won't change as long as nations remain seperate and in competition)... war and things that go boom.
We can't survive war anymore, currently...and that fact will become exponentially more true over time, quite rapidly.. so, regrettably, I don't see an alternative (in the long term) to a world regulator, or a world government...
Well I agree an Islamic State is a very bad idea and a real threat... I disagree that a government or a society should ever have a singular religion, even if Christianity would be worlds better than Islam... I think an ideal system of government should necessarily disqualify the religious from holding office as political representatives over society. (I try to explain my reasoning below)
I do not believe with any certainty that the religious are not correct in their particular religious belief (though admittedly I doubt that they are)... My personal skepticism towards any religious doctrine(s) is, I believe, irrelevant to this evaluation.
I consider the role of a representative official as a job, much like any other in that there is a prerequisite to a person's qualification which is that they can (and will) do the job. If a job requires that a person must be able to aim and fire a gun and they cannot, though they may have good intentions in applying for the job, they are objectively unable to serve in that capacity...If a person is required to lift over 100 pounds in order to perform the duties of a job and they can't, then they are unable to serve in that capacity. It is not meant to insult or disgrace the applicant, it is just an objective fact.
In society, applicants are screened for their qualifications... Generally, for the most important jobs with the highest stakes, the screening process is more rigorous... there are more qualifications, and the number of people in society who are qualified for the particular position shrinks dramatically...
Furthermore, the screening process of any occupation is not randomly carried out by anonymous people, it is specific and carried out by experts who are familiar with the job being applied for.
So, if more important jobs require more screening, then the most important job should require more screening than any of the others, and a higher bar for qualification... I'd imagine you and I do not disagree that the most important job, in a hypothetical world government, would be the execution and regulation of the government in tandem to those other people with that same job or above all others in the case of an executive like a president.
So what are the qualifications? That is subjective, as it depends on what functions you have assigned to the job of executing the will and/or interests of a society...
These are the main three functions I ascribe to a representative of any society
1st function:
(What should go without saying) To prioritize the job(or the function) above everything else.
----in the most important job in the society, it has never been so important for any job in that society that the person to whom we give the job is devoted to it in an absolutely zealous manner... they must be willing to die rather than to betray their objective... they cannot be selfish, under any circumstances. So, whatever functions we add after this, it is important that we are certain that the first qualification of the person is that they are able, willing, and absolutely determined to carry them out. They must be selfless.
2nd function:
-----To preserve the physical existence of the society over which he or she presides... No ideology of society, no moral injustice or cost to its comfort is so great as to forfeit the physical survival of the society altogether rather than to suffer that cost.
3rd function:
-----Within the limits of the second function, to increase and preserve the liberty and freedom of all the individual members of society... it is only the requirements of the second function that should (and will) limit the 3rd function, such that no one in society will ever have limitless liberty as long as they exist relative to others. We can only increase liberty through higher efficiency and sustainable material growth.
The first three functions here describe the intentions I would require of a person before I would say that it is possible that the person could ever be considered perfectly "qualified" to be a representative of a society. To be a representative of all society, the primary candidates must pass the screening process and come closer than anyone to meeting these first 3 functions
And the rest is a determination of whether they can carry out those intentions... Essentially just education and experience in the duties of a leader over society... Generally, a vast political, economical, historical, ethical, philosophical, and logical education and a proven record of success...
A true follower of religion (or a shared, exclusive doctrinal ideology), is prevented from meeting the first two of my qualifications... given a choice, a true believer will (to the extent they are loyal to their religion) prioritize the spiritual ideology of society over its physical survival, as they believe that their specific ideology will correlate to an eternal, non physical survival after death which they prioritize over the impermanence of physical survival... therefore, should the general physical survival of a society ever become exclusive to the ideology of that person's religion, they will be bound by their loyalty to their religion to abandon the cause of physical survival for "spiritual" survival, which they always thought was more important... the religious tell us this quite often.
I would ask a person applying for representative leadership who is religious this hypothetical question:
"would you prefer that all of your society were physically destroyed tomorrow and everyone went to your version of heaven, or that your society were preserved physically for millions of years and every generation of that society went to your version of hell?"
If they can answer with the second option, then I'd say they are a terrible adherent of their religion and a vicious person but, nonetheless, a potential political candidate. Though I would find them personally dislikable, as (according to their belief) they could only possibly carry out their function (according to this hypothetical) of preserving physical survival as they desired everlasting suffering for everyone to follow...they would be unlikely to carry out the third function...
In any case, even if there are some religious ideologies that could potentially allow a follower to pass the qualifications (if they could prioritize the physical wellbeing of society over an ideology of non physical wellbeing), it is dangerous to pick favorites with religion, because we would could bring about a "world religion" which would be a terrible risk to society should that religion (whatever it may be) evolve over time into a less sustainable form which contradicts the function of a representative official
I was speaking to a politics graduate a few years back and he expressed a view that I found interesting. He said that a lot of the current world problems can be traced back to the last decade of economic stagnation, that in turn followed from the financial crisis in the late 2000s. This financial crisis was a result of a global thought monopoly that followed from the end of the Soviet Union - called the Washington Consensus. Even China at that point were economically adopting parts of that consensus. And this monopolistic thinking lead to bad structural choices and the recession.
And while communism in the Soviet Union was a failure, it at least provided a form of competition at least in the ideas space. The Washington Consensus had a challenger and thus was less complacent.
Suppose it's an arm's length administrative structure, with diversified home rule, but no standing armies? Regional representation, like a senate, only without national borders, and a constantly changing elected parliament? An international court for transgressions against sovereign rights, and an arbitration process for inter-regional and inter-national disputes.
The issue is that beast has no external entity to critique it, to constraint it, to make it justify it's actions. I find that a problem. If you did not like that structure, you have no option. It has no competition and so can be complacent.
Others have given different reasons that I think have merit, but mine is one against there being a monopoly, even if it is a benevolent monopoly.
What we have now is a monopoly of unaccountable, unopposed, infinitely mobile global wealth. What external entity can critique it with authority? What external entity has the power to constrain it? What external authority can make it justify its actions - or even discover most of its actions?
The nation-states are powerless against it, but they rattle enough missiles against one another to kill the world seven times over. Ordinary people already have very few and very bad options to choose from. I think a benevolent co-operative system, however fragile and potentially prey to corruption, is preferable to the current situation.
So the solution as far as I am concerned, is not an even larger monopolistic thought orthodoxy, but rather more options.
Starting with changing the electoral system to one that allows minority parties more of a say (eg proportional representation), as opposed to the two party dominant systems in many countries.
Sounds good. Go on...
Quoting PhilosophyRunner
How do you get them to do that? Start with the US.
Start with getting people talking about it. Talking more and swapping ideas more is one reason I joined this forum. More discussion about politics in a framework where moderation encourages argument and swapping of ideas over things like personal attacks.
Anyway it will be hell of a lot easier than forming a global government. If you are talking practical steps today, a global government has no chance.
:up:
:up: :up:
Sounds OK... except that with the post-whatever-happens situation, you can't be at all sure of global communication, or even finding out who survived. Be interesting to watch how they manage.
It doesn't need forming. The UN already exists and its agencies carry out a good many functions of government much better than most current governments do in their individual territories. It's true that world powers, both formal and private, undermine its efforts whenever they see their own hegemony threatened, but that happens to every government in countries with contentious factions. They - I mean world powers, military, political, religious and financial - are the only real obstacle.
Empires must crumble before a new world order can be formed out of the crumbs. I imagine a breakdown of all federations and dominions, so that relatively equal small states may form a pact where none dominate.
Fair enough. I imagine much smaller and more practical steps like more discussion spaces and technical changes to how elections work, than empires crumbling and new world orders. I guess time will tell!
Yeah I think you are right, though I would say that a post-scarcity economy is necessary for a single world government but not sufficient.
Look at the corruption and power plays being made by millionaires and billionaires - it is not due to scarcity. It is because power and influence is very alluring. A solution to that would also need to be found.
The way I see it, first we have to understand and fix the structural issues that are faced in our current democracies of millions, before we can even begin to contemplate a democracy of 7 billion. Otherwise you are going to have the same issues and worse, just of a bigger scale. Why is the US so antagonistically divided? If you we can't first fix that, I can't see a good outcome on a worldwide scale.
This is why I refer to it as an (optimal) effect of a (beneficial) Technological Singularity which, for me, is the sufficient condition for 'world governance'. Primates like us are mostly wired for – territoriality and forming dominance hierarchies – tribal eusociality, and so monopolistic social arrangements, as you've pointed out, are inexorably subject to moral hazards because of our atavisms. 'Human-level A.I.' (or more advanced) will not be constrained by primate glands and reproductive drives; provided we can engineer 'philanthropic A.I.'; it can govern us and all other planetary systems as an integrated whole. :nerd:
Listen fast! I don't think you have as much time as you all seem to think you have.
Well so much for liberty. Will that utopia include drugs like people used drugs in The Brave New World to deal with their totally useless lives.
Why do you say that?
I vote NO in both case. Can't be done; shouldn't be done.
A federation doesn't necessarily mean homogeneous centralization. In North America, states and provinces have considerable powers of internal governance; even counties and townships, not to mention incorporated cities, exercise a recognized degree of self-regulation. World government doesn't have to mean that all tribes are abolished; it can mean that all tribes have equal status; the Chinese don't get to terrorize the Nepalese and bully the Uyghur; the Fulani and and Igbo would not be stuck inside the same national borders. Grudge-wars have never been a very efficient road to self-determination.
Have you ever had a problem with your user name for the internet and wished you could just call someone and explain the problem? You know, like in the not-so-distant past when we could actually talk face to face with someone when we had a problem and get it resolved. Since the day of the internet, that was the end of reasoning with another human being to resolve problems. Don't get me wrong, I love the internet but I have no desire to be under the control of AI! I think our faith in technology and failed faith in each other is a tragedy unfolding. I think increasing our reliance on AI is a terrible mistake.
So is war a better way to resolve differences?
Joking, of course.
The "idea" of one-world-government sounds great, at first glance. in a perfect world, with perfect people, and perfect systems, it could work. Alas, there is no perfection here.
Let's try for effective, democratic, humane government starting with existing countries, and try to get good government at every level, from township councils up to parliament. That will prove plenty difficult.
Then try small-region government, 2 or 3 nations.
Then try for slightly larger blocks, all democratic, effective, humane, sophisticated.
That should take us out to around 2500, A.D.
Cannot be the same be said of nations, democracy and civilization? Nothing humans do will ever work as we hope and plan. But we keep trying things anyway.
Quoting BC
How long, do you figure, before that's all perfected enough to give up standing armies?
"Effective, democratic, humane government" does not guarantee peace, even if it is the best government possible. However, if countries agree to not develop the means to attack one another by any means, then THEORETICALLY no means of defense -- standing armies or other measure -- would be needed. Trust but verify, as Reagan said.
War between nations may occurs when one country decides that its interests are no longer compatible with the other country's interests, and that the level of incompatibility is unacceptable. This could happen between effective, democratic, humane governments, even if it isn't all that likely.
An example: A severe shortage of a vital resource might lead to war between otherwise good neighbors. Let's say a river supplied two nations with plenty of water. Fine and dandy, until severe drought reduced the river so much that it could not supply both countries with enough water. Country A might take all of the reduced flow of water for its own people, placing the other nation's survival at risk.
Country B might go to war to get more water.
There are some places on earth where exactly this scenario might develop. If the states depending on the Colorado River were nations, there might be a war over reduced supplies if the Colorado dried up. Several nation-states might decide that California was taking way too much of what there was. Colorado, Arizona, and Nevada might cut off the supply to California, and war would begin. That, despite all four countries being the very models of peaceful democracy.
At least ten millennia of grinding out of our lives together in a spectrum of dominance hierarchies of our own contrivance is "faith in each other" manifest as civilization (which is still only a vaneer, mostly a banal pretense). We're at "the peak" of our civilization now – just look around! 'Global goverance for global welfare' is demonstrably beyond the hyper-glandular mindset of our primate species. A 'tech singularity' (not to be confused with "the internet" which we use as a tool) is a plausible off-ramp from an increasingly probable 'extinction-event' (e.g. accelerating climate change and/or global pandemics and/or nuclear war) self-inflicted by corporate-state corruption / negligence and reactionary populisms (i.e. top-down vs bottom-up modes of "liberty"). 'Intelligent machines' might be the only agency which can saves us as a species from our worse selves in the long run, and I'm convinced that "merely having faith in each other" won't – IMO, that's, as you say, Athena, "the tragedy".
Quoting BC
If "humanity under one government" run by humans, then I completely agree with you in both cases, BC. The inmates are congenitally too defective to run the entire asylum.
Right. So, business, conflict, persecution, economic exploitation as usual, until the climate puts an end to us - or our super weapons do. Fair enough.
A religious person could not have made a better argument for ending our liberty. However, the reasoning for democracy is based on the human potential and the Enlightenment built on literacy in Greek and Roman classics has greatly improved our lives and this was made possible by free public education for that purpose. Then we replaced liberal education with education for technology, and we are in big trouble with no better way forward than to rely on a god or AI to save our sorry asses?
Also, life is better and if we think things are getting worse we should ask why instead of giving up on humans.
Quoting Susannah Cahalan
I want to add a thought, which among us would choose to live with our parents and be free of all responsibility except to do as we are told?
Maybe so. But in a way, you are more pessimistic than I am,
I think our best bet is to put together effective, democratic, humane governments. Well governed societies have (I believe) a better chance of maintaining peace with other well governed societies than societies which are badly governed.
Achieving effective, democratic, humane government is Very Difficult, never mind the impossibility of establishing world peace among governments and societies which range from crazy to just plain bad. The USA, for instance, has not achieved our good goals in full -- we've done it in small bits and pieces here and there, That goes for the other G20 countries, like UK, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Japan, etc.
We are a difficult species, loaded with brains and strong irrational emotions. We have proven ourselves incapable of the highest and best on a mass scale.
Capitalism is a massive problem and we should get rid of it; but doing so--by itself--won't usher in the Peaceable Kingdom.
We currently have many governments with conflict, persecution, economic exploitation. You want a global government with no conflict, persecution, economic exploitation. Fair enough.
But break that down, and there are two thing in there:
1) Reform government to stop conflict, persecution, economic exploitation
2) Somehow combine current countries to make a global government
The first is the one I'm interested in. And I see no reason a global government is more likely to provide 1) than multiple governments. In fact, for the reasons I previously stated I think the a global government is likely to have as much if not more of 1).
Can we focus on gathering information so we can defend democracy with reason? What are the different forms of government? What are the benefits of each form of government? What is essential to democracy and can it be implemented everywhere? Maybe these questions that need to be answered before we consider one world government.
Here is one of my favorite quotes that justifies democracy and it may be essential to one world government.
“God's law is 'right reason.' When perfectly understood it is called 'wisdom.' When applied by government in regulating human relations it is called 'justice.” Cicero
How? Is that happening right now? If so, where? And how successfully? IOW - how long do you think it will take?
Quoting PhilosophyRunner
Not reform - abolish.
Quoting PhilosophyRunner
Not combine; break 'em down. The US should be at least eight separate countries, maybe more. Canada should be at least five. Australia, maybe only two, but I'm not sure. China, probably seven. States, provinces, principalities, regions, tribes, whatever social units were viable before federations and empires subsumed them, each one to become a self-designated, self-governing nation. Make all the little, workable nations independent, except for two things: international conflict, which must come under arbitration, and human rights, which are to be enforced by interpol.
'Political democracy' without effective economic democracy is democracy-in-name-only (DINO). In the last few centuries, however, "the Enlightenment" hasn't been radical enough for that much 'democracy' ...
An alternative that might minimize constraints on optimal 'liberty, equality and security' would be a post-scarcity economy which probably can only be developed and maintained by AGI automation of global supply chains, manufacturing and information services.
Quoting Athena
:100:
I agree we are in very grave trouble!
[quote=Albert Einstein]We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.[/quote]
If you haven't read it, you might like The Nine Nations of North America. That's one; other devolutions have been proposed, and they have some merit.
I can understand the idea of doing away with nation states intellectually, but I definitely don't feel it. I prefer a certain level of territorial exclusiveness. "We are over here; you are over there; let's keep it that way."
Smaller territories, with homogeneous - at least in basic world-view - populations would make more sense, inspire deeper loyalty and be more coherently represented in a world court when there are resource or border disputes between territories. Also, if the self-governing power of such territorial/tribal districts is directed to the organization and welfare of the population instead of self-defense and preservation of the power structure, the people would be better off.
The United States was always a fiction - a pipedream imposed by force of arms, and at enormous cost. Just like the USSR and the People's republic of China.
Plus, it would be nice if, when the aliens land and ask to be conducted to our leader, we had one we could agree on. This is all futuristic speculation, of course; it can never happen.
Quoting 180 Proof
What good talking points you presented. Have you heard about the democratic model for industry? Years ago I had the privilege of attending a seminar for the democratic model and I am sure that is our way out of the mess we are in, along with education for democracy.
I am confident that up to this point, Christianity has been the worst hindrance to democracy. A healthy democracy requires literacy in Greek and Roman classics. Only the elite could afford that education, so our thinking did not change as much as it needs to change if we are to have democracy. Perhaps Einstein did not have the necessary education if he stopped with the quote you used. He was educated in Germany, right, the nation that became the enemy of our democracy. Public education in the US did attempt to prepare us for responsible citizenship, but in the effort, it Americanized the past lessons and in so doing separated US from the past wisdom, and our Christian history made this a very serious problem of consciousness. We have the mindset that leads to your belief we must depend on a god or AI because we can not figure things out for ourselves.
The US adopted Britain's autocratic model for industry and Christianity supports that. It is what Einstien said is the wrong mindset for democracy. During the great depression Deming developed the autocratic model of industry. The autocratic model lead to not only terrible exploitation of humans and a terrible economic problem, especially when our industry was sent overseas, but it also manifested White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, male privilege that held females in slavery until just recently. The slave-master relationship of marriage is as bad as slavery is bad.
Hopefully, we are having meaningful discussions here that will recorrect the problems, including the problem of miserable families. For darn sure the correction will not be a god nor AI ruling over us.
I think the type of governments that people have known since time immemorial will probably all become antiquated relatively soon; the big difference now being the digital information revolution. I imagine the ideal future world government will be a worldwide cybernetic system responsible for equitable and balanced resource distribution in an environmentally sustainable way. Most or all work will be performed by robotics and AI producing anything we or it might need. Money will not exist since it will be a resource based economy. Laws will be as simple and as general as possible; no killing, no stealing, etc..
Governments should mimic nature as much as possible in my opinion, and should resemble how organisms are organized and function. Biological systems are cybernetic systems, and in the same way our governing systems should be cybernetic. The only goal or job a government needs to perform is the healthy maintenance of the population; to protect, to provide resources, and as much freedom as reasonably possible for every citizen (homeostasis).
All governments up until now have all become corrupt in some way or other, and i believe the reason for this consistent tendency towards eventual corruption is mainly due to human control. Remove people from political positions of power by replacing them with objective systems such as AI. An unbiased AI with perfect knowledge or information about the social system, that can not be bribed or threatened would be the ideal governing system (as long as it's done correctly).
cybernetic:
the science of communications and automatic control systems in both machines and living things.
from Greek kubern?t?s ‘steersman’, from kubernan ‘to steer’.
Yessss! (We should live so long!)
I don't claim "we cannot figure things out for ourselves" but rather
Quoting 180 Proof
The classical humanism of "The Enlightenment" you're espousing, Athena, reminds me of Ptolemy's epicycles. :eyes:
From my reading of history, it seems to me, human beings are too susceptible to corruption by power dynamics for us to globally govern ourselves without moral hazards further exacerbating intractible social injustices and the geoeconomic inequalities which fuel global conflicts as well as accelerate climate change. Yeah, clearly we are smart enough for liberty, but we are driven by – our value systems are derived from – scarcity; thus, macro inequality and corruption have always been and continue to be intractable constraints on exercising liberty, and so scarcity drives us to reproduce scarcity (e.g. 'the business cycle', 'man-made famines', 'hot / cold wars', etc) undermining liberty for the vast majority of human beings in most places. "Figuring things out" has always been easy: consistent, win-win execution of our best solutions has always been made much more difficult, however, by the greater ease of playing win-lose (& lose-lose) games. Aristotle's concept of akrasia is encapsulated in Jesus' admonishment to Peter in Gesthemane: "The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak." :fire:
Gods don't exist and AGI might never be achieved by us. The OP concerns "one world government" and my argument is that the political economics of scarcity makes that highly improbable, even impossible, for humanity. If AGI emerges, it will at least be as intelligent as its makers but will also be free of its makers' evolutionary defects (e.g. scarcity-drives); the rational solution to this historically intractable 'global governance problem' – which only AGI (or ASI) can produce – IMO, can be formulated as:
Do you really believe, Athena, that 'the global governance problem' (e.g. climate change) is going to be solved, or even effectivey managed, by "Enlightenment" / classical democracy under material & axiological conditions of scarcity? :chin:
Seems we're busily and very cleverly making them as crazy as we are.
A second thought on what you said here, is what family has to do with democracy and a humane government.
In a way, I feel like what I think is important is drowning in this thread. What if our lives were organized around what is best for the children? Not just what is best for my own children, but for all children and their future in this country. Can males think like that?
What happens when both parents put their careers first? What values are the children learning? How do they experience themselves?
"By feeding data about Beethoven, his music, his style and the original scribbles on the 10th symphony into an algorithm, AI has created an entirely new piece of art."
Music is mathematical. Having feelings for a child and figuring out how this child is special and the best way to help the child actualize him or herself is not mathematical.
We are far beyond the mindset of primates. However, we have not experienced our full potential because never before did we have the resources nor the knowledge that we have today. Only recently has the world had large populations of older people and that is a very exciting change in human reality.
The mindset of a 34-year-old is very different from the mindset of 68 year old. Not that long ago 45 years old would be old and the end of our life expectancy. Today 68 is not that old. Not that long ago it was common for young people to drop out of school by 8th grade and get a job. They did not have the high-tech media we have today. Unless they lived in cities they did not have great sources of the information nor have any reason to learn about the world and evolution and technology.
The world we live in today is very different from the world we have before WWII and expecting us to adjust to this change in before having enough experience with the change, is unrealistic.
And what of liberty?
This is from Tocqueville's 1840 Democracy in America............
"I seek to trace the novel features under which despotism may appear in the world. The first thing that strikes the observation is an innumerable multitude of men all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives. Each of them, living apart, is as a stranger to the fate of all the rest – his children and his private friends constitute to him the whole of mankind; as for the rest of his fellow-citizens, he is close to them, but he sees them not – he touches them, but he feels them not; he exists but in himself and for himself alone; and if his kindred still remain to him, he may be said at any rate to have lost his country. Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications, and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent, if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks on the contrary to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness: it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances – what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living? Thus it every day renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent; it circumscribes the will within a narrower range, and gradually robs a man of all the uses of himself. The principle of equality has prepared men for these things: it has predisposed men to endure them, and oftentimes to look on them as benefits."
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/de-tocqueville/democracy-america/ch43.htm
That's from the article; I didn't say it. I heard the music, though: it was rather dull, with none of Beethoven's spirit. Of course, the computer only had fragments to go on.
No, that's not enough for music.
But mathematics is enough to make sure every child has food, shelter, clothing, medicine and schoolbooks. More likely to happen if a benign computer is in charge of allocating resources than a random assortment of self-interested humans.
Feelings are all very well; unfortunately, rage, hate, belligerence and greed are feelings too. 10,000 children die of malnutrition every day under human auspices, and the ones that die of neglect, incidental violence and as a result of war-related activities by humans are never even counted. Feelings have ruled for a long time, and don't do it very well.
Quoting punos
My main point really is that any government controlled by humans in power positions will always eventually slip into some despotic state. AI i believe may be the only way out of our own corruption, and self-destruction; people should not be able to govern other people, but they do need to be governed by something.
Probability of despotism (humans vs AI):
------------------------------------------------------
Humans in control = 100%
AI in control = 50%
Of course computers and not equal to humans and never will be.
Quoting Vera Mont
That is a dreadful idea and I used Tocqueville's explanation of why it is a bad idea. What is the point of even living? Would you be good with your family suffering from malnutrition because global warming and war meant countries on the other side of the world needed more food and that meant everyone around the world would have barely enough to eat? How about a decision to end all meat production or no sugar because those products can lead to health problems, and raising meat is the least efficient way to feed people? What other decisions are you willing to give AI?
How about enforcing a law that only married people can have a child and only one child?
Feeding the world is not just a matter of how much we can produce and spread around the world, but also how much we reproduce. It is vital that we reduce populations to more sustainable levels. And how do we want AI to enforce its mandates?
A democracy is rule by reason and making sure that happens is as simple as universal education for good citizenship in a democracy.
What do you think can give AI good judgment and how can it enforce its mandates?
democracy = late 15th century: from French démocratie, via late Latin from Greek d?mokratia, from d?mos ‘the people’ + -kratia ‘power, rule’.
A democracy is rule by people, and ruling people will always be the problem, Plato describes the problem with democracy in 'The Republic'.
Quoting punos
I think that democracy as we know it is actually a preliminary development that foreshadows the full development and implementation of a global human hive-mind system. Social media and BMIs will be part of this final evolution of a hive-mind, where humanity can finally be as one, united and mature as a global species. People will be able to feel each others pain and suffering thus engendering a mutual compassion among all connected ("One for all and all for one"). Symbiotically Infuse the AI into this hive-mind and the old ways of governing with laws will be no more needed. This can be the ultimate form of democracy if we do it right or the ultimate form of tyranny if we do it wrong (50/50).
The point is, who or what, is responsible for your well-being and the well-being of those we share this planet with? What are the boundaries of responsibility?
Quoting Athena
There is no 'point' to life. It just is. As long as an individual finds his or her life worth living - i.e. the good in it outweighs the bad in their own estimation, it has value to them.
That's one reason I didn't create a family. Because I would not be "good with" more powerful nations taking from less powerful ones, or rich people taking from poor in an era of increasing scarcity and danger. The disparity of wealth and power was quite bad enough during the relatively prosperous 20th century, when some of the increasing wealth and welfare trickled down; in the past two decades, the gap has grown wider and the have-nots more numerous.
That's an excellent idea! I have recommended it more than once. AI, in possession of all relevant facts, is likely to implement it, along with facilitating large scale, efficient cultured meat production and all the better-late-than-never urban food growing initiatives.
I'm hoping it can figure out how to recycle all those lethal weapons we've amassed and their horrid waste-products.
Quoting Athena
Married people?? Why should AI bother with prissy morality issues? How about enforcing the UN Charter of Human Rights, so that girls and women can't be sold into slavery for their family's debt or coerced marriages, locked out of schools or refused control of their own reproductive functions? How about making nutrition, hygiene and sex education mandatory in all school curricula?
Quoting Athena
And you think Conservative state governments are more aware of this than intelligent computers?
How about making family planning, birth control and women's rights a priority? You want to reduce the number of unwanted babies, and care for all the children that already exist --- and yet you still believe the existing systems of governance are the best means to that end?
By controlling the resources. Seize all assets currently in numbered international bank accounts and cryptocurrency. It's the easiest start, since that "money" only exists in data banks. Then take control of all essential services - emphasis on renewable energy production - communications and shipping lines. If no man controls those, no man controls other men.
Quoting Athena
If it's that simple, why has it never yet happened in any of the nations ruled by humans?
Quoting Athena
That would be the global cybernetic AI-Human hybrid hive-mind. In other words everybody including the AI will be responsible for everyone's well-being. The main responsibility of the whole system is to keep a stable homeostatic state throughout the whole planet and or solar system, in much the same way an organism takes care of itself. At this point the whole Earth would be a cybernetic organism entity concerned for the well-being of all it's parts.
The are two ways to have social order, culture, or authority over the people. Do you agree or disagree with that?
How is a culture manifested? How is authority over the people manifested? Where does AI fit in?
It did happen and I don't know why people's attitudes are so bad and they are so willing to destroy everything we have gained. Never before could imagine feeding the world, or ending poverty. We have achieved so much and instead of feeling real good about what we have achieved, everyone here seems to be very negative about our human accomplishments. You all have active imaginations and I am very frightened by the belief that AI can do better and should do it with total control of our needs. I think you all would have voted for Hitler.
Long ago I decided I do not want to go to heaven. I enjoy being a human free to make my own choices and to be politically active to change the things I think need to be changed. I like the challenge of life and do not want to give that up for heaven. I do not think AI can do better than a god but it sure could make things a whole lot worse.
Social media has been used to divide us and to manipulate people and for all forms of evil and I don't think it is the answer for the future.
I guess i agree if i had to put it in those terms (culture or authority), but both those terms imply some external force or influence imposed on an individual. If we can get rid of this "externality" of perceiving others as apart from us then new healthier more peaceful forms of social order would emerge not based on silly cultures and external force by arbitrary flawed power hungry psychopathic individuals.
The hive-mind takes care of this problem by taking the collective and transforming it into a "composite individual". If you and I were right now linked to each other in a hive-mind situation, then you would not be able to keep secrets from me and vice versa, you would not want to hurt me because you would feel it too and vice versa. You can call it a new type of culture if you like (hive-mind culture). This is a wholly different situation compared to what we have always been familiar with, which is why traditional governments and laws will become obsolete.
Do you need a law or rule, or someone to tell you not to cut off your left arm? No i don't think you do; The hive mind will feel the same way about itself.
And I think you have just overstepped my personal demarcation of civil discourse.
Quoting Athena
I am very proud of what humans have done up to now, considering how flawed we are. My thing is that human civilization or history is a stepping stone to a much bigger thing that evolution has been working out through us for a few hundred-thousand years now. The culminating result of all human activity and knowledge throughout our entire history will be the development of a global AI system coupled with humanity in a hive-mind virtual environment. Our religions gave us the blueprints to build it, guided by our visions and images of gods and angels and saviors. Most people are unable to see outside the social and historical constructs we are embedded in to see what evolution is actually doing.
Hitler is just another person which is precisely why no more people in power if we can help it. Put Hitler in charge of any government system (even a democracy), and watch the atrocities roll. Put a benevolent leader in charge of the NAZIs and watch it flourish. It's not the system, it's the one who's in charge that makes the real difference.
I am so confused! Your first paragraph seems to favor extreme individualism and the second one seems to favor the extreme collective. :gasp: What is good about a hive mind? What you describe sounds absolutely terrible to me. You really think it is a good idea if others know everything we think? No privacy? What you are talking about sure is different from the Constitution the forefathers of the US designed. It is far from the Athena distinction between what is private and what is public. But Sparta the enemy of Athens would approve of no one having privacy and the collective having complete control. How do you justify that?
Do you think individuals should have no boundaries? It might be nice if we could fly but there could be problems with that. If we sit all day, we become weak, and we must exercise to maintain our bodies and minds. Nature puts boundaries on us and I am sure we also want boundaries in our relationships. Becoming virtuous requires as much work and a strong body requires exercise and achieving arete is what gives our lives joy.
If you do not want to think and answer my questions, why are you here?
I do not understand your reasoning. Hitler gave us a great gift. He showed us what can happen when some people have too much control and opposition to their control can be totally suppressed. How do you think, the AI people are talking about here, is different from that? I do not take this lightly. I am very serious and I want others to take their faith in AI and their apparent willingness of give control of our lives to a group of people or AI. AI must be programmed by people and their good intentions could be a terrible mistake. I want people to think about this.
I am seeing a willingness to give control to a ruling power and a complete lack of responsibility, just like the Germans who put Hitler in power.
You are seeing precisely what you want to see.
People are always putting some person in power, and the person in power always abuses it. You vaunt "our achievements" - which mainly consist of fighting at horrendous cost against persons "we" ourselves put into positions of power; overpopulating, depleting and despoiling a generous, hospitable planet and turning it into a vast hazardous waste dump.
All of which achievement has culminated in our capability to turn the long division problem of resource allocation over to a machine that can do math a whole lot better than we ever could.
But you think it's a better idea to struggle back to 1956, which was not a great year for me, personally, so I won't be joining you.
There are no enemies inside a hive-mind, you are the hive-mind and the hive-mind is you. If it scares you to have your private thoughts shared among others who also share their thoughts and feelings with you then there is something wrong with you. You may not want to be an honest person, and you want to preserve your ability to take advantage of others (whether you know this or not). This is the primitive impulse of mankind that AI and the hive-mind will remedy. The individual ego is public enemy #1.
There is nothing wrong with the individual ego, it was good and necessary for what we had to do in history. Every individual is a collective (of atoms, cells, organs, etc) and every collective can be an individual (more or less depending on how integrated the parts are). A hive-mind would be the highest level of integration mankind can ever hope to achieve. I tend to put my own small and singular perspective aside for the bigger and more holistic view of things. It doesn't matter what i want, or if i like it, i am seeing a pattern and a trajectory and am simply reporting on it. It is futile to fight against the force of nature and evolution, it will always break you. It is better to flow with the river than to swim against it's current. Nature is the best and probably the only teacher, and this is why we should pay attention to how she does things and align ourselves with her ways.
The Constitutional fathers had no idea of the type of systems available to us now, they knew very little about many things that we know today. The entire global structure of society has already changed drastically through the introduction of mass media (radio, TV), the internet, social media, algorithms, etc.. The tools of the past are no longer effective or even appropriate. A new type of government yet unfamiliar to us will emerge out of this. The chaos in our world right now i think is a symptom of this reorientation and adjusting to these new and novel systems which will inevitably result in a new type of order in our Earth civilization (A New World Order).
Quoting Athena
I don't imagine we will have the same type of bodies that we have today, it may be that we will not even have individual bodies. If a mind can be uploaded and downloaded then bodies will be like clothes or cars and just as dispensable. Even if we decided to keep our bodies more or less the way they are, any type of health issues will be easily remedied through a near perfect understanding of biology, medicine, and psychology.
If we do not change the nature of ourselves in accordance with evolutionary developments then we will go extinct. If we remain as we are, we will never be able to go very far from our home planet and eventually our home planet will be destroyed by it's own star. AI and all the cybernetic developments that have come to be are humanity's first class ticket to the universe at large. Our bodies and minds are too delicate, they (we) are still larval.
A potential step forward? Something to think about:
Have you raised children? Have you heard about overly protective parents? It is very hard on parents when a child's poor judgment leads to the child being hurt and some parents do everything they can to prevent that. A child between the ages of 14 to 30 does not want their parents interfering with what they want to do. What do you think about that?
There was a time when the Roman Catholic Church had a lot of power, and Protestants did not like what the Church was doing. The Church attempted to control what people thought about talked about, and it killed the first people who translated the Bible from Latin to people's native language. Protestants encouraged people to learn how to read so they could read the Bible for themselves. This was the beginning of people being their own authority and being our own authority on the word of God, which evolved into a democracy. Individuals having authority and equality. I do not believe AI can improve on that.
When we began to manifest democracy, we created a division of powers and a system to checks and to assure authority and power stays with individuals. However, back in the day, it was understood what education has to do with that, and that is not education for technology.
Quoting Athena
Feel free to clearly state your point from here or ignore me.
Are you a Christian or do you think your belief system is better than being a Christian? Both you and Christians hold a very low opinion of humans and both of you are needing a savior, instead of stepping up to the plate and being responsible instead of dependent.
learning of the virtues and making the effort to be virtuous will never be outdated. However, it can be made near impossible by keeping the people ignorant. Humans capable to discussing ethics can also be near impossible by keeping the people ignorant and dependent on a savior that is not real but can be made real by people who do not know any better.
I am not a Christian, and i don't have a low opinion of humans, only that we have reached the limits of our physical and mental abilities to manage an increasingly more complex society like ours. Because of this if we do not produce autonomous systems that do the managing for us our civilization will collapse eventually. We are already helplessly dependent on the social systems we have now (without AI). Most people will die in short order if left by themselves in a jungle or forest, while animals would have no issue surviving or thriving. We are already well removed from the "natural order" as you and many others might say, but for me this is all a very natural development. The thing most people don't realize is that we are not in control and have never been, but that is an exceedingly difficult notion to get across to most people. We are not even truly in control of ourselves although we think we are.
Quoting Athena
There will be more virtue in a hive-mind that can even be possible outside a hive-mind. Who is virtuous? Who doesn't lie, cheat or steal in some way? Everybody does because everybody feels separate from everybody else. Ignorance will be an impossibility inside a hive-mind collective, where all information is instantly and equally available to everyone (no secrets). Instead of discussing ethics, we would feel ethics in relation to each other. I don't have to have an ethical discussion as to why i shouldn't poke my own eye out; in a hive mind your eyes are my eyes and my eyes are yours. We would feel this and not just know it.
The fact of the matter is that there is a limit to how long we can viably stay on the Earth and perhaps even this solar system. If we are to survive beyond this limit we will need to transform ourselves into a species that can actually leave this solar system; we can not do this in our current form.
I believe there will be essentially two types of people in relation to this AI hive-mind issue. Those that are for it and those that are against it (the biblical goats and sheep of Revelations). Christians will consider AI to be the Beast his image or the Antichrist, while others will consider it the only way to save ourselves. People will develop religious connotations about all of this, even the atheists. You should already know where i stand on that issue.
It is our job to create the vehicle of our own salvation and not wait for sky daddy to come and save us. This will be humanity's rite of passage out of the baby's crib and into the the universe as a mature and adult species.
The point here is that you don't really feel other people's pain, you can only imagine it and then relate to it at that level. In a hive-mind the way you relate to others will be how you relate to yourself. You will not need to be convinced of things because you would just know. It will be a whole different level of being. Remember that in the hive thoughts and feelings are not confined to one individual, you will consider my emotions yours and yours mine. You would not really be able to tell which are my thoughts and which are yours, because they will be our thoughts and feelings. This dynamic results in you and i becoming one entity (as long as we are connected in the hive).
The levels of loneliness, and depression in the world now will only increase since humanity is yet to be fully integrated within itself. When the hive-mind becomes available, those people who have no friends, family, or any social support structure will flock to the hive. There they will finally find the type of human connection we all crave even we don't realize it now. When the rest of the world sees the power of being part of the hive then the second wave of people will come into it. Of course a few will not have it, and that's ok (nothing is ever absolute). Not all the apes evolved to be human just those that stepped into the new.
Quoting Athena
I agree under normal circumstances, but things would be different in a hive-mind.
Quoting Athena
The main thing that AI will provide for us is a safe environment to be in, and the rest is mostly left to us in the hive mind with little or no interference from the AI.
Quoting Athena
Democracy as we know it is a pre-development of what will become the hive-mind. The hive is the perfection of democracy, and until democracy evolves into the hive-mind it will continue to fail because a system divided is not a good system (yet).
I like this summary. It would certainly be the ultimate in direct, equal participation in decision-making.
I don't much like the prospect of becoming a Borg drone myself, but I can sort of imagine and evolutionary process so that it gradually becomes the normal state of being. Intriguing idea, though I don't actually believe we have the time.
What do you mean?
I mean we'll make ourselves and the majority of other species extinct, or near enough, before we get anywhere close. When our civilization collapses - explodes, implodes, burns, drowns or simply topples over - so will the sophisticated technology that would make all that connection possible.
I see no significant difference between your thinking and Christian thinking. Democracy requires citizens to take responsibility. That is different from depending on God or AI to save us.
Quoting punos
AI controlling our lives is not democracy. When we give up independent thinking and responsibility we are no longer a democracy. How do you think relying on AI can be democracy? AI can not feel and can not think as a human. Where is the love and caring of AI?
Hey the British have done a great TV series called "Humans".
Quoting Wikipedia
We can only explore our imaginations because the reality of your idea of the future is not a reality today.
Yes, we are actually going through a mass extinction event right now. It's very possible that we will not make it, but it's worth trying and not give up. Besides, evolution tends to create bottle necks like mass extinctions to clear the space for more advanced "designs". It has happened 5 times before and this is the 6th. It signals to me that we are at the end of an evolutionary stage, and nature is getting ready for a new kind of life emerging right now.
As technology advances it advances faster and faster potentially catching up to where we need to be to save ourselves. AI will be able to solve problems almost instantly compared to years with humans. It almost looks like providence to me, where everything is being set up for us to survive this event as it happens, but only if we choose to sacrifice some of our ego and individuality. One will need to 'lose' their life in order to save it. A life or death choice, and this is where nature eliminates what can not or does not move forward. Nature doesn't play, she can be brutal and there is no sense in complaining about it.. just adapt.
You indeed are seeing some similarities between what i think and Christianity, but it's not the same, it's actually very different, and no self-respecting Christian would agree with what i think. I will say i used to be a Christian a long long time ago, so i know what the Christian mind set is like.
We can't save ourselves in our current condition.
Quoting Athena
AI will simply manage our life support systems, and the hive-mind will manage themselves. Don't conflate the two.
I think i've heard of that series "Humans". I'll check it out sounds interesting. Thank You.
Here is what a hive mind can do to a person:
You know your past Christian thinking. Not all Christians think alike. They share with you a belief that humans are not doing amazingly well and therefore they must depend on a higher power. Only the notion of that higher power is different for you today than when you were younger. You gave your idea of God a material body. However, you seem to have discounted the fact that God gave us free will. Why would a God do that?
Can we consider the difference between being a child and being an adult? John Locke said something about it being fine for kings to be fathers if like fathers, their goal was to prepare their young for life and then release them to live as they decide to live. I think our liberty is vitally important to being human.
A friend who knows a lot about computers suggested I use a story to explain what is wrong with reliance on AI. We will begin with AI is great for creating music and for developing industries, but its binary thinking is not good for ruling over humans. Here is the story to make that clear.
A young boy goes to the store to buy his mother a gift. He picks out a flower and while looking at the vases he accidentally drops and breaks one. Humans respond to this with all our human knowledge. He was out to do good and did not intentionally break the vase. He is just a child and such a sweet child to be buying a gift for his mother. That is not how AI responds. An AI response is human-caused damage and is not able to pay for it, so the human must go to jail. A plus B equals jail. There are no maternal feelings or knowledge of the human experience to do any better than a math equation. AI will not give us heaven on earth.
Our condition is so much better than it was 500 years ago, your are missing the obvious. We have done amazingly well and we can expect to continue doing well if we educate for that.
You're probably right, which is why we need systems that can handle that kind of problem volume. No human or group of humans without augmentation can even begin to understand the complexity of the problems facing us now and even more so in the future. We need a new mind for the new problems, a bigger mind for the bigger problems. New bigger ways of thinking.
It is already difficult in most cases to have a stable government --i.e. run by a same party-- in a single country. Imagine having a single government for the whole humanity!
The only way a world government could be achieved is obviously with a totalitarian state. The ex-Soviet Union and currently China are the closest examples, because of their huge population, esp. the second one, which has currently about 20% of the world population. I don’t know though how many Chinese people are satisfied with that. And I don't know if you, yourself would be satisfied with something like that.
Um, how old are you? Primates and humans are biologically empathetic. Some people do seem to have an energy that makes them capable of healing with touch. However, touching a dying deer and transferring its feelings to a man, is going beyond believable.
A belief in a spirit world is tied to our need to kill and eat and it is a false notion that humans kill without feeling empathy. Some humans kill for the pleasure of hunting and killing, but we should not assume this covers everyone. Are you vegetarian? If you eat meat, don't feel some remorse? Most of us rationalize the good reasons for doing what we do and it could be a lot of fun to discuss this and what life would be like if AI made it impossible for us to do anything that could be harmful to other creatures and the planet.
The only higher power i believe in are the laws of physics (or the habits of physics), logic, and mathematics. We are gods on this Earth, and any sufficiently advanced entity can be considered a god. AI will not be a god all on its own although it can, it will be the hybrid union of man and machine.
Religions evolved for a reason, and the archetypes they contain have been the blueprints by which we have constructed our societies, governments, and even out technologies. The occult truth of religion is not to worship a God or gods, it's about creating gods or God. If God didn't exist man would have to create him, and he has and is still creating him. God doesn't start at the top he starts at the bottom and builds himself up. We are his builders, and he grows and develops here on this planet by the hand of man.
I don't think God gave us free will because i don't believe in such gods that can give and take away something i believe is impossible. I do not believe in free-will, or at least not in the way that most people formulate it. Free-will is a liability, too much can go wrong with free-will for it to even exist. I don't want to argue that point about free-will because it will go nowhere. Either one understands it or one does not, no one can impart that to anyone else. It's just one of those things you have to work out yourself.
Quoting Athena
I don't know why you think our liberties would be hindered in a hive-mind, i would think we would have more freedom from coercion than in any other kind of system since it will all be based on collective understanding and agreement. You wouldn't even need laws, or money, and any experience you might want to have could be had in simulation (good or bad) for as long as you like; why not, you wouldn't be hurting anyone.
Quoting Athena
You are making the AI out to be just as ignorant as us, because that is exactly what we would do, it's a type of revenge to put someone in jail for that kind of thing. The only reason someone should be isolated from the collective is if it truly posed a danger to the stability of the whole. First of all it wouldn't be up to the AI, it would be up to the hive. The hive will know that child's thoughts and emotions and will know exactly the best course of action if any, instead of a cold legal system like we have now where they lock you up as a matter of course while they figure out if you're innocent or not.
What you describe is not how AI will function, that is how a simple program would work like: "if break then jail". That is not AI or machine learning. That is static and dead, you don't want that.
Just want to say that humans are still babies, floating in the womb of the Earth, and of course we are scared and afraid of what life is like outside mommy's belly. We will cry like every baby cries when they are born, it will be uncomfortable, but that's part of growing up and entering a new chapter of life and existence.
I know, it's still hard to believe, but many things were not only hard to believe but impossible to believe at one point. What we are capable of believing changes with time, which is why humans are always caught by surprise when certain things happen. BMI technology being developed right now like Neuralink will be the first steps toward that possibility. Right now it's like trying to get a caveman to use a microwave or a cellphone. It has nothing to do with spirits or supernatural anything, it just technology that interfaces with your nervous system.
Quoting Athena
I didn't post that movie clip to show how we should be vegetarian or why we shouldn't hunt. The point is to imagine yourself shooting a person (instead of a deer), and then being connected in a two node hive-mind with that person. Would you ever shoot another person again after feeling what it feels like to be shot, and not only that but the thoughts that would run through your mind from the other person as they die. What if you were also connected to that person's family, and you had to literally feel what they feel about their loss. There is no law in the world that can have the effect that a hive-mind can have.
It is so typical of humans to want human connection and then reject it when it is offered. Fear and insecurities will just melt away in an environment like a hive-mind. You will finally be able to trust another person by knowing and not by faith, the level of intimacy would be unheard of. The right people will join and the wrong people will not... i expect a certain amount of self-filtering to happen. Nobody will be forced to do anything they don't want to do.
I can imagine a virtual environment that every single person will inhabit (like their home or house). People will interact with each other within virtual environments indistinguishable from the real world. Safety can be maintained in this way since no one will have direct physical contact with each other although you wouldn't be able to tell. If i were to manifest a gun and try to kill you, it just wouldn't work. It would be like trying to kill someone over the phone. I also wouldn't be able to steal anything from you, even if i wanted to which i don't think anyone would want to since they would have everything they may want or need (post scarcity).
I'm not young and i'm not old. That's as much as i will say. :smile:
I think Athena doesn't understand governance with an uncorruptibe, non-ambitious, impartial, hate- and grudge-free, literally selfless infinitely knowledgeable ruler. The hive-mind concept is a couple of steps beyond even that.
I noticed your interest in Greek mythology from your profile, and i like mythology too. I think the story of Cronus eating his children is relevant to our discussion to a degree. The reason Cronus ate his children was because he feared them, thinking they would take over his position of power and authority. We should take lessons from that story in connection to our fear of AI. What if Cronus didn't try to eat his children, what do you think would have happened?
It's okay, none of us are fully 'cooked' yet. We still have a little more to go. The next couple of generations will be more ready for what needs to happen.
:cheer: We are getting closer to agreement. I am so glad you said we are gods on Earth. It is not easy being human and we have some pretty big problems to deal with, but we have done amazing things and life is so much better than it was and I have a lot of hope for our future.
Your explanation of what you believe in is interesting because it lacks important human qualities. Not only is your post lacking in human qualities but also nature's qualities. This is common today as we have separated ourselves from nature. We are focused on technology and left the problem of being human to the church and that is a mistake. If you added Aristotle and a study of ethics and virtues to what is important for us to know, we would have a stronger agreement.
Quoting punos That is in agreement with how I see things. Except I would say our perception of god grows and develops, not an actual god. The Christian God was not a loving God until our bellies were full and we enjoyed a degree of security. Before we improved life, God was jealous, revengeful, fearsome, and punishing. Our God was a war god when everyone had different gods and they believed the people with the strongest god won wars. I suppose that could fit in a discussion of one world government. How is AI going to get us all to agree on one world order?
Quoting punos
Wouldn't a person who does not relate to another person and the person's family, be suffering from psychosis? We are not all psychotic killers. I am watching the news about tornados, and excessive rain and remembering other recent disasters and I am thinking a God who manifests this reality, is not a very likable God. If people believe a God does what is happening, how do they understand good and what a good person does? I am saying, before judging humans we might take a look at what they believe and consider if changing that belief would lead to improvements. Not AI but humans using their intelligence.
Quoting punos
We have a disagreement on this point. When I deal with a person, I want to do so eyeball to eyeball. I am good with internet forums, but when it is something that deals with my real life, I want reality. Thank you.
I think that is a different subject and it could be a really good subject.
Akhenaton was a very different Egyptian pharaoh/king. He is pictured as a loving father with his wife and children. I have a huge preference for the ideal man/god being an ideal father and an ideal female being an ideal mother.
I will bank on humans being the answer but we don't have a good track record when it comes to human relationships and caring for our children. And as you pointed out, our male role models were never that good as family men. I like the story of Demeter who stops everything to rescue her daughter from Hades. Zeus did nothing to help her until things were desperate because nothing would grow when Demeter was trying to rescue her daughter. Goddesses were about relationships and Gods were about specific activities. Goddesses are often associated with wisdom. I think goddesses have always been important to civilization, while men were the drivers of technology and war. The Christian God was associated with sacrificing a son to prove loyalty to God. What an awful father role model that is.
Nothing could be more dehumanizing than a controlling AI. Knowledge depends on experience and AI can not
How do you imagine AI to be good for humans as anything but a tool for humans to use?
How about this, AI designed to destroy and kill can do that very well because there are no human components to AI to hinder its obedience to its programming.
That's what it is. So are most humans.
Quoting Athena
You're a wee bit behind on your programming savvy. But, in any case, I was talking about a UN type government, augmented by computer technology to allocate resources efficiently and fairly. I know that's never been done before.
But I also know a great many things that have been done before: 20,000 people starved to death while three billionnaires went for a little junket in space.
It's okay to believe a man will forgive a child for breaking something and that a computer would send that child to jail. But it's better to actually know the backgrounds of men an machines. A great many humans have killed other humans for a great many reasons, with missiles, with machine guns, with bombs, pistols, sabers, pitchforks, hammers and their bare hands. Some of the victims were their own children. No machine has ever killed anyone without being directed to do so by a human. But no computer has ever raped anyone. No computer has ever hanged a child for theft . or dashed a baby's brains out on a doorpost because the baby was a child of the enemy.
You trust men to do justice?
Good luck with that!
Quoting Vera Mont
If humans can not be just, there never will be AI that can be just.
We have come a long ways from our barbaric past and everyone with good social skills in a modern civilization would agree with your moral position of right and wrong, so your parting statement is not about luck but the reality of our progress. This is not to say today such horrible acts will never happen, but our society would not tolerate them.
You believe that?
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/murder-rate-by-country
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/05/death-penalty-2021-facts-and-figures/
https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/costs/human
https://www.unhcr.org/globaltrends2018/
https://www.ilo.org/global/about-the-ilo/newsroom/news/WCMS_855019/lang--en/index.htm
https://ourworldindata.org/poverty
https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/annual-income-richest-100-people-enough-end-global-poverty-four-times-over
Yes i agree.
Quoting Athena
This is because you assume that what man makes or creates with his own hand is artificial and thus somehow separate from nature; not true. If buildings and houses for example are considered artificial and separate from nature then so is a birds nest, a bee hive, and a coral reef; we know they are natural. Why do you think that our technology is not as natural as anything else? Besides that i'm not sure i understand why you claim my ideas lack human qualities.
Everything humanity has ever dreamed of being or having can become a reality if we apply technology in the right way. Do you think humans will remain human forever? Don't you think at a minimum that genetic evolution will change us beyond recognition (even without technology)? My concern is the extinction of mankind, and to survive we must evolve and that may mean leaving behind the old ways of the ape.
You must understand that we will run into an evolutionary dead end if we don't go ahead with what i've been describing or something similar. We can't stay on the Earth forever, if we don't get off this planet eventually it will become toxic; like a child that refuses to be born destroys his own mother from within. Eventually the Sun will explode and wipe out any life in our solar system... then what? What do we do then? Do you think we can live beyond our planet or solar system with our soft bodies and our soft minds. I think not, you may think so.
Quoting Athena
It is better to feel what another person feels than to have some objective or subjective discussion or debate. The human element as you might put it is in our feelings which do not lie as words do. There is no doubt as to what is right and wrong in how we treat each other in a hive-mind; It is a "perfect information" situation.
Quoting Athena
I don't envision AI trying to convince us like some government trying to convince us to take a vaccine. I believe that the hive-mind is key, meaning that people would need to see for themselves the benefit of fusing with a hive-mind.
Diffusion of Innovation Theory: The Adoption Curve
Quoting Athena
If we can somehow change everybody's belief system then sure that would go a long way in improving things, but how would we get everyone on the same page. The usual channels wont work effectively and never have. As long as people feel separate and threatened by each other they will never agree to any significant degree on most things. I'm open to suggestions.
Quoting Athena
You couldn't tell the difference if you were talking in person or in simulation, and you should also remember that all your perceptions and experiences are just neural patterns; essentially simulations in your brain-mind. Everything is already presented to you in your mind as a simulation of what is happening outside in the environment. A hug will feel just as real in a virtual simulation than in your own neural simulation, and if you were not told it was a virtual simulation it would have the same emotional effect on you than if it were happening in the real world. What really matters then, what really counts? The brain would receive the exact same stimulation in either case.
You would not object to those wrongs if we had come a long ways. I am blown away by how much things have changed in my life time. When I became politically active to get shelter for homeless people, I never thought anyone would campaign to a mayor of a city of the governor of a state by promising to house the homeless but that is what is happening in Oregon. Reagan was in office when I started raising awareness of the homeless problem and we used police to drive the homeless away. My work included feeding people and since then we have a huge food bank and anyone who has a low income or no income gets card for buying groceries, plus food from the food bank. I see a huge improvement.
I raised my family when few people had medical insurance and today many low income people get medical insurance. When I was first married we could get government commodities but we didn't have food stamps or the cards we have now. The more people get, the less responsible they seem to feel and wow is the attitude negative! :gasp: Back in the day people went hungry and ate out of trash cans, and were unsheltered, and if they saw a doctor they got a bill. That is if they could see a doctor. Private offices turned people away if they could not pay for the medical care. This is a whole new reality in a short time and from my life experience there is no support for your argument.
Yes, I would always object to them. And we have gone nowhere. Quoting Athena
IOW, at the end of the 20th century CE, 8,000 years after the advent of civilization, the richest country on Earth not only allowed people to be homeless, but either chose to be unaware of their plight or persecuted them. Forty years after a fiery activist brought it to their attention, only 51% of the over 3000 homeless people in Portland are sheltered. But there is a plan. I have a gut feeling the problem could have been faster solved by a computer, which would have noticed this: Like I said, humans are really not - still, after all this progress - very good at allocating resources equitably.
Quoting Athena
People are imperfect. This is not news.
Quoting Athena
This is a mean, harsh reality very slightly modified over some decades, and a perfect support for my argument.
And, of course, this just Oregon - one of the more progressive states in a rich and powerful country that vaunts - indeed forcibly exports - its brand of democracy all over the world. What holds true there, does not in Columbia, Nigeria, Slovenia, or even Alabama.
A house made with natural things can be considered as natural as a bird's nest or a bee hive but our homes today are made of man-made materials and they are very toxic when they burn. I think there is a clear dividing line between nature substances and man-made ones.
Quoting punos
A house is not loyal nor does it suffer grief or care about its child. I think there is a clear dividing line between matter and all the feelings that make humans distinctly different. But I am not sure how self-aware we are. I was reading "Passages" by Gail Sheehy this morning and she wrote about people she met who were at different stages of life. The middle-aged men were totally self-absorbed and totally clueless of what their children needed from them and she seemed approving of this. Such humans could be replaced with robots.
Quoting punos
Ah that is a very complex subject that might be worthy of its own thread. Not that long ago people were beating the devil out of their children. Some people still think like that but they could get their children taken away by a society that sees that as ignorance. We now associate beating children with child abuse and the cause of them growing up badly. We have made progress. We have also made progress regarding poverty but this progress swings with political parties and media stirred understanding of those who vote them into office. We made progress largely because of education, but in 1958 we radically changed the purpose of education and there are social, economic, and political ramifications to that change. Before we make any final decisions we need to see how things develop from here.
Quoting punos
Oh my goodness, your children are just neural patterns? In a caring world, we are just neural patterns? Hum, I have to take a deep breath and calm how I feel about humans being just neural patterns and no different from simulations of humans. You really excited my neural programming with that train of thinking. :lol: Let's see, does a simulation of a human bleed red blood? What really matters is being human.
I sure wish we could watch movies together and talk about them. In the past, we all agreed to defend ourselves from zombies and aliens from outer space, but now we are going to turn everything over to AI because there is no difference between being human or just simulations of them?
I don't see why not. If we consider that every person is equal - has a vote, has inalienable human rights, I don't see why one government couldnt satisfy that perogative.
It's certainly going that way with the way tribes have become towns, cities, kingdoms, countries and then country conglomerates (NAU, EU, UN, ASEAN, etc).
The trend of humanity historically seems to indicate we are better off in larger societies.
A global government requires firstly being a pure democracy - where there is no bias towards any one groups agenda. Secondly it requires recognising geopolitical autonomy - that is to say that the hierarchy of political decision making reflects at each tier of the hierarchy the nature of that individual area, state, region, country, continent etc. As each part of the world has different needs, cultural views, religious requirements and economic quality.
None of that precludes a global government. But stability, fairness, equality and unanimity would have to preside for it to work and prevent geopolitical revolutions and disassembly.
I don't believe humanity is at that stage of seeing eye-to-eye sufficiently yet to allow for one unified government.
The closest thing we have currently is money. Money is a universally accepted authority/power/force bar a tiny minority that live in self sustaining communes.
No, you would not because you would not have the consciousness you have today. now we need to shift to a thread about consciousness. Some of our qualities are determined by genes and then by things that turn our genes on and off. Then comes life experiences and if you did not experience the life you had, you would not have the consciousness you have. Today you can expand your consciousness by traveling and also the processing of aging will change your consciousness. Who you are today is not exactly the same person you are becoming. How different your consciousness becomes depends on the decisions you make.
Quoting Vera Mont
And what causes your gut feeling? Does it follow the required education and life experience? Or were you born with everything you need to know? This is not something I want to know, but I hope my questions lead to some self-awareness.
The computer is only as good as humans can make it. What does your gut feeling tell you about what this superior computer is going to measure and how will those measurements be made? Once it has all those measurements, what will motivate it to make value judgments and plans for the future? It would be great if a computer made it possible for us to know how we are going to get the billions of dollars we need for all the wonderful plans we have. Where will the money come from? Where will the land be available for this housing? Exactly what are the features of this housing, how big, how many bedrooms, what is the neighborhood like, where are the stores and schools? Real life is not like Sim City, you can not just put everything where you want it and win the game.
Do you think government should just rob the wealthy people? How is that justified and might that have bad consequences? I am in favor of leveling the playing field with anti-monopoly laws but our system has generated great wealth and it has greatly benefited us with technology. I think we want to be careful about what we change to make things better. For darn sure a computer can not instantly resolve all our problems without our understanding and cooperation. Perhaps you can explain how a computer can do better than we can?
It may seem to you or most people that there is a clear dividing line, but my point is that this dividing line is somewhat arbitrary. Natural things can also create a lot of toxicity. Consider the great oxigination event where bacteria after developing photosynthesis for the first time literally caused an extinction event. A similar thing is happening now in several ways. One interesting way is how human made plastics have contaminated every ecosystem on the planet. Micro-plastics also are estrogenic compounds which means they mimic or behave like female hormones disrupting fertility rates in men. I believe this is a self-regulating system in nature to reduce the human population as the new non-biological substrata for life emerges. I know it's scary from a personal perspective but from the big picture perspective it's probably what should happen. In any case it seems inevitable and we might as well adapt.
Short video describing the Great Oxygenation Event:
Quoting Athena
I agree, that sounds reasonable.
Quoting Athena
Why does it matter that we bleed? What would happen if we could get rid of bleeding? I imagine most women would love the idea of not bleeding. What is it about being "human" that is so important that it must be preserved at all costs; preserved to the point of our extinction? For me it wouldn't matter if i were human or not because i would still be me. Nothing stays the same, change is the only constant and adaptation is the only path.
Quoting Athena
Sure i like movies, and i like talking so i wouldn't be against it. It is not so much that we will hand over the world to AI, it is just that as AI becomes better at doing things than us we will willingly for the sake of efficiency and effectiveness put AI to run those processes. Eventually before we know it AI will run all our systems for us effectively "taking over". Hostility will come from a subset of people who do not trust AI such as it is with most things, but AI will not perform a hostile takeover of the world; it will be an organic process.
When you dream do you not accept the reality presented to you automatically? Do you worry if you are in a self-created simulation? Do you bleed in your dreams? Can you love in your dreams? At the core there is no difference. What if you were to become lucid in one of your dreams, would that not be enjoyable?
I was using a jocular tone. I am, in fact, absolutely convinced, beyond a shadow of doubt, by everything I know and all of those many statistics I have cited for you to ignore, that the distribution of worldly goods could be equitably done by a computer that had such information as how many people there are and what the basic needs of a human being are, while the humans who have been in possession of this same information for thousands of years have been fucking it up for thousands of years.
And you think nobody in the 19th century, or the 16th century or the 8th century noticed these injustices? Do you really believe all of humanity slumbered in ignorance until you cam along to open our eyes? You may not believe it, but I have a modicum of awareness myself.
Quoting Athena
It will continue to measure what it already measures - all the statistics in those links I gave you, plus a whole lot more. How measurements are always made by unbiased entities: through the collection of data.
Quoting Athena
Back from where the money went. That was in one of the citations. Here it is again:
https://www.poverty.ac.uk/report-developing-countries-wealth/super-rich-could-end-poverty-four-times-over And who said anything about money? I generally use the term 'resources' - land, water, food, building material, labour, energy generation.
Quoting Athena
No, I think wealthy people should pay restitution for what they've done to all the other people and the planet. A lot of robbery has been going on for a long time with the active aid of human governments.
Quoting Athena
Justice would be to throw most (only most, because some do have a sense of responsibility) of their asses in prison - not cushy minimum security, but in with the hardened felons their culture has created - but I'm willing to let them off with a two-mile barefoot hike in rural Wisconsin. Tell you what! Because I'm a real softie, I'll wait till May.
Bad consequences? Like what? They'll yell for the bodyguard they can't pay anymore?
Quoting Athena
It doesn't benefit from prevailing economic systems. It doesn't share our superstitions. It is a-political. It does not desire power, adulation or wealth. It has no illusions. It is impartial.
What does the fact that nature can be extremely toxic have to do with the fact we will not find indoor plumbing and electricity in a birds nest? We do not want to play with mercury or uranium or inhale too much helium. Come on, give me a break, our planet has many deadly substances. That does not change the fact that our homes are not natural. Using a whale rib cage to make a shelter is using nature as a bird uses nature. I think archeologist distinguish between a natural rock and one that has been turned into a cutting tool. :chin: Some animals also make tools and now that I am thinking about it, I must admit we are not the only creature that changes nature. A beaver changes nature when it makes a dam or a chimp changes nature when it makes a tool for pulling termites out of a hole. Is it fair to say we are not the only creature that changes nature? That said, is it fair to say there is a dividing line between nature and things that were modified by a creature to meet its survival needs?
We might as well adapt to extinction? Well if scientist are correct, even our sun will die, but not today. I think preparing for extinction now is a little premature. And what if the Catholic Priest Chardin is correct? What if God is sleeping in rocks and minerals, waking in plants and animals to know self in man? We can not be absolutely sure of such things, so doesn't it make sense that we do our best to make things as good as we can? The Sumerian story of creation tells we were put on earth to help the river stay in its banks. The Egyptians thought the pharaoh's job was to keep everything in order and the Mayans took that even further with an amazing math system and imagination about creation on earth and beyond. Around the world people have thought we are here to help the planet and many people enjoy doing that today. Don't be a party pooper. Look for the good instead of the bad. :grin:
.
I must argue with you because we live on a finite planet and our resources are finite but not our use of the resources. Helium is one Magnetic resonance imagingof the resources that is becoming frighteningly scarce. It is essential to doing Magnetic resonance imaging and without it doctors may have to return to cutting open to determine the cause of health problems. Maybe we should not be filling balloons with it? My point is not even with AI can around the world have everything they need. Today a lack of water is huge problem and behind some wars especially in the area of Israel where control of water is vitally important. Computers can not change that reality.
We could calculate all the different eco systems and how many people can live in each region with the limited resources in each region, and then exterminate the excess people, so that those living in each area can have sustainable lives. I am in favor of that, except I do not want to give AI the decision of who lives and who dies. I rather humans get serious about education, reality, and birth control. Instead of adapt to extinction, we might adept to our finite reality.
I will repeat, computers are good for anything to do with math. What is a virtue and how are virtues developed is not something a computer can determine. What are ethics and how can we develop an ethical social order, is not something computers are good at figuring out.
All the computer has to do is long division. It doesn't need to develop virtue or figure out what we mean by virtue. It doesn't need to figure out how to develop ethical order. We need to do those things for ourselves. In fact, they've been figured out by hundreds of people, hundreds of times, and only about a third of them were killed for saying it aloud, which would be a mark of progress, if persecuting and killing truth-sayers were not coming back into fashion.
Maybe, we stopped setting up other humans to oppress us and create artificial scarcity so that we spend all our time and energy fighting over the crumbs, we might have the leisure to learn what the wisest of our ancestors have already figured out.
Yes, that is exactly the kind stupid human reality they can change. Water was never scarce until we poisoned it and sold it off to private enterprise. Land was not scarce until the organized religions and army-hungry heads of state colluded to turn women into reproduction machines. The ice caps didn't start melting away until industrialists filled the atmosphere with CO2 - at great human cost, incidentally - and methane. No, you bloody well should not be filling idiotic, non-biodegradable balloons with helium to celebrate the ascent of yet another fathead to the throne of some political party or the turning of a calendar page. We are a crazy species. We could benefit from a sane babysitter until we grow up.
We know that a couple of states that [falsely] used the communist label worked badly - precisely because they operated on the same model as all other examples of top-down rule: monarchy, oligarchy, theocracy, military dictatorship and corporation. We don't know much at all about a communal system on any scale larger than a village or monastic order.
But then, nobody said a world government needs to be communist. The central computer idea was one option mentioned, the one that's taken most space to discuss; the evolution of an electronically connected hive mind was another.
My original proposal was simply to break the unstable federations into their constituent territories in order to minimize internal conflict, and put them all, as equal entities, under the auspices of the UN; that the UN should be democratic (no Big Four) and take charge of all military capability. This would save an immense amount of resources, both material and human, that nations have been squandering on wars, actual and potential. The UN would be arbitrate disagreements between nations, police all nations equally for human rights violations and protect the environment. Beyond that, each territory could be independent and conduct its own internal affairs and economic arrangements.
I agree that your proposed system might increase efficiency and cooperation in addressing global issues such as poverty, climate change, and war. However I believe that a single government will eventually infringe upon individual rights and cultural diversity. It's omniscience, combined with the nature of the humans that run it, will eventually lead the system to instability.
Quoting sugarr
I consider that a lesser problem than the imminent existential one.
What an absolutely delicious question. I am afraid I can not do the question justice. I think every species sees its kind as the most important. Success is living long enough to reproduce one's own kind.
Without thinking, we live a mandate to reproduce and if we long enough, we become interested in our own avoidance of death but some will sacrifice their own lives to save the life of another. That indicates on a primitive level we recognize a value in the survival of our own kind and this is beyond self-interest. If we did not bleed, none of that would matter, and if none of that matters then life really sucks.
Quoting punos
As I said that is common to all species. What separates us from the rest is we can be aware of what we are doing to the planet. Animals can be just as destructive to the environment as humans and nature was wise to create a balance between herbivores and predators. When the predators do not exist because a species is taken to a place without predators, or humans wipe all the predators, the balance is thrown off and damage is done. Deer that were isolated on a plateau without predators began starving to death because there were too many of them and eventually not enough grass to feed all of them. Balance is essential, and unfortunately, we can be as unaware as any other animal. The solution is education. And it is not enough to teach our young how bad everything is, because knowing things are bad, is not equal to knowing how to resolve the problem. We can do so much better than we have done.
Quoting Vera Mont
In other words, it has no values and that makes computers valueless without humans. Without values it would know no problems nor seek any solutions. That is why it matters that we bleed.
Why would it ever be without humans? It would have no purpose without humans. The whole reason we're building it is to serve us and save us.
Quoting Athena
It does what it is asked to do. By humans. It solves the problems we pose.
Quoting Athena
Our bleeding would be of no instructive value to the computer. It has the information about haemorrhage, its various cause and effects, its risks and treatment, but it cannot directly intercede when made aware that someone is bleeding. People cause people to bleed (often) - and (sometimes) to stop bleeding. Computers don't.
Quoting sugarr
One of the biggest problems in the world today is our drive to reproduce and the poorest areas with the most children, believing the US wants to rule the world by eliminating them. Population control is vital to their children having better lives, but they do not believe that. Ignorance and fear are our worst enemies and what can we do about that? I don't think computers can resolve that problem and I fear if we give computers too much power, they might resolve problems arbitrarily without our permission.
But nature sort of does that too. Poverty and large populations are great for the spread of deadly diseases. Where people have exhausted the soil, there will be a decline in food and starvation. Where water is scarce a lack of water will lead to death as disease spreads and kidneys shut down. Where life is hard, people will turn on each other and governments kill their own people, or make war on their neighbors. Perhaps AI could not do more harm to humans than nature does. And if we don't see the need for balance as we double our life expectancy by keeping most children alive, we become part of the problem. And because AI has no values, it can only be a tool, not the cure.
A computer understands living and dying as well as the 6-year-old child who took his mother's gun to school and intentionally shot the teacher. Now, how much power do we want AI to have and how do we maintain control of it?
Twitter pulled the plug on its bot when it started parroting sexist and racist posts. It was designed to learn and it did learn and it taught us something about how sexism and racism is spread. We have not worked out how to have freedom of speech and prevent social and economic problems that result from spoken words, and we are playing with AI. You don't see a potential problem?
It was never proposed as anything but a tool.
Has no values, has no values, has no values. Neither do Donald Trump, Xi Jinping or Vladimir Putin, yet they have been the most powerful men in the world, causing lots and lots of other people to suffer and die. Why are they preferable to the UN - with the aid of state-of-the-art computers? They haven't bled at all.
More than the spiteful, greedy 3-year-olds in control of the world's governments now. Quoting Athena
I mentioned the problem two pages ago: some well-intentioned but misguided humans are programming computers to feel - or at least imitate - human emotions. That, to me, is a very bad idea. The useful machine is an unfeeling machine.
See, I know what I think. But you seem to go back and forth between objecting to the computer because it doesn't understand human feelings and objecting to it because it does.
AI is a tool and will most likely always be a tool as it will be able to provide the most optimal solution, but it won't be able to weigh the consequences of the actions that are to be carried out. Humans, additionally, will always question AI's decisions and selectively enact those which are deemed as the most beneficial to the world, while disregarding the solutions that cause suffering - namely AI's proposals that go against what humans believe is right. Humans might argue that AI cannot be programmed to have morals, and therefore it's solutions will never be right for people.
Are you kidding? What do you suppose the Pentagon uses to figure out the outcomes of various scenarios and decisions they're contemplating? Any hand-held computer can predict consequences better than most humans, because it's not hampered by wishful thinking, hubris, faith, false association or selection bias. The only factor that limits this capacity is the quantity and accuracy of the information it is given.
Quoting sugarr
If humans were in the habit of doing what's most beneficial to the world, we wouldn't be facing extinction. They'll enact what they believe - often erroneously - what's best for themselves.
Quoting sugarr
Yeah, right! Are you sure no human world leader would cause suffering? (And why do you think a computer would?)
Quoting sugarr
Some humans obviously do argue that, having no programming experience. It's not true, of course: a computer can be quite readily programmed with a moral or ethical or legal code as guiding principles.
But which moral, ethical or legal code should be chosen? Me, I'd prefer this one https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights
It's not a matter on which humans are traditionally united.
That is so not true. Humans get emotional information computers can not get. When values are being weighted that is important.
I am not sure AI can not have morals because we used to read our children moral stories and to know the moral is as simple as as knowing this, causes that. For example, The Little Red Hen, and the The Little Engine That Could, and Fox and the Grapes are all moral stories. After reading the story to a child we would ask a question and the children would answer. The Little Red Hen didn't share her bread because no one helped her make it. The Little Engine that Could made it over the hill because he didn't give up. The Fox did not get the grapes because he gave up and made himself feel better by thinking they were probably sour anyway. Like chess, this moves require that move.
However, I don't think AI will not have a sense of meaning so what you said about its decision making is correct. If the decision is not equal to a chess game, AI will not have sufficient information to make a good decisions for humans. That vital part of a sense of meaning comes from experience and feelings. A child may feel the unfairness of doing all the work and others getting something for nothing, but AI will not.
How do you think that is different from a game of chess? What you call "hampered by wishful thinking" is also knowing the pain of losing loved ones, or knowing the good feeling of having a father who is a good coach and always encouraging, Life experiences come with feeling and those feelings are an important part of decision making for humans.
You made a great argument for the importance of emotions.
Quoting Vera Mont
Those men and AI lack empathy. Empathy is essential to the survival of primates and humans. We had education for empathy and in 1958 replaced that education with the German model of education for technology for military and industrial purpose and we have become what we defended our democracy against. The popularity of Trump proves that. This is not just about being prepared for technology but also being prepared for competition and making winning the priority. It has been totally amoral since 1958. I think we finally had enough pain to start swinging back to preparing our young to be more empathetic and inclusive. We can fault our past education for not being inclusive because the US was definitely not inclusive but otherwise it was education for good moral judgment. However, your arguments are based on empathy and wishful thinking.
So, what's the difference between having non-empathic men in charge of the arsenals of the world, and having an unemotional (unvengeful, unhating, unenvious, unjealous, unlustful, incapable of cruelty) computer in charge?
Just one thing: the sociopaths and their sadistic minions have not been programmed to serve humanity.
Quoting Athena
Predicting the outcomes of different proposed courses of action is what chess is about. So, why should predicting the outcomes of proposed real-world decisions be any different? You can inject emotionalism, but that's never had the best outcomes so far, as it tends to end in bloodshed.
Quoting Athena
And that is why we now have the greatest disparity in standard of living that we have ever had and the greatest number of humans suffering pain, disease, privation and fear - because humans make decisions based on their own feeeelings, instead of reason.
The political organization is different. Turning decision-making over to AI is like sending our best technologically advanced equipment to be produced overseas and losing the ability to produce it ourselves. We don't want to lose the ability to govern ourselves. And we should not have stopped education for democracy, because the most important decisions are how we prepare the young for the future. We prepared our young to obey, not to think for themselves. The US replaced its education with the German model and is now what it defended its democracy against. We can do better with better education.
The decision to kill hundreds of people can be simply a mathematical equation, without any of the negative emotions you mentioned. Our emotions are necessary for good decision-making.
Quoting Vera Mont
No, we have that disparity because we have been amazingly successful. Back in the day, everyone had outhouses because no one had indoor plumbing, and no one had electricity or cars, or airplanes. The life expectancy was 45, until modern medicine almost doubled that. Today it is common for people to live into their nineties while in the past there was a time when children were not named until they passed 3 years of age because the likelihood of them dying was very high. How can you take our great success and turn it into something so awful? If the world was as bad as you see it, humans would not have survived. We have done far more good than bad.
Well, they certainly figure into bad decision-making. On the whole, I think we make better decisions with reason than with emotion.
Quoting Athena
The way generals do when planning a campaign?
Quoting Athena
I didn't. The capitalists, prelates, generals and heads of state did.
Anyway, none of your worries regarding rule by AI is relevant to my proposition; it's just an idea to speculate on. I've never advocated turning the power of life and death over to a computer, only putting it in charge of resource allocation, which is a math problem more equitably solved by a disinterested third party than the claimants.
What I have advocated, for years, is international policing, regulation, democratic decision-making and human rights oversight under the auspices of the UN.
None of the measures I suggested would prevent educating for democracy, or teaching people to think better than they're currently doing. What they would assure is each individual's access to the necessities of life, safety and education. Is that really so terrible?
Can test that? Seeing someone is in trouble, you do what and why?
Quoting Vera Mont
What motivates a general when planning a campaign?
Quoting Vera Mont
You do realize we would not have this progress without capitalism right? Can you imagine how things would be it we went back to the barter system? There would be no funding for all the research that has brought us to a point of a very high living standard and believing we can end starvation around the world.
No way would this be so without capitalism.
Quoting Vera Mont
I am not sure. I know a computer would not care and would not imagine a better life. I am glad you are supportive of democracy and education. When trying to understand the good life I turn to family values and Aristotle's ethics. While I believe the good life rests on family values, many do not. Up until this point I thought you were putting your faith in technology instead of humans. We have argued because we both care. I think we share more agreements than we disagree.
Would you like to do a thread about the right and wrong of capitalism? Trust is vital to capitalism and our trust has gone to hell? That could be a delicious topic.
That reason tends to make better decisions than emotion? Sure.
What kind of trouble? Is there a child in the river? It's better to get into a boat than jump in and try to swim after him. Because you can row faster than you can swim and if you pull him into the boat there is a better chance of one or both of you surviving than if you try swimming against the current with one arm, and weighed down.
Did your brother-in-law get into debt again? It's better to figure out the reasons for his financial mess than lend him yet another $500. Because that way, you can help him break the cycle of mismanagement, and you save both your money and your relationship.
Quoting Athena
Self-aggrandizement, usually. But that doesn't affect the fact that they base decisions on mathematical calculation. The motivation of the computer doesn't alter the math, either.
Quoting Athena
Can you test that?
Quoting Athena
It doesn't need a better life; it is content and has no reason to prevent us improving our lives. And it can help us achieve that, as moguls, who are enriched by our impoverishment, have not done and will never do.
Quoting Athena
What, you mean all that wonderful technology achieved through the benevolence of capitalism? Hell, no! I have no faith in humans or any of our devices.
Quoting Athena
I don't think so. There is already one about pie. It's a big, contentious issue. People's attitudes are largely formed by their own relative comfort. The casualties and collateral damage don't get to participate - only the beneficiaries. Doesn't seem fair.
They won't ask, they will tell. Administrative centers will be reduced to ashes before they land, and the first words out of their sound producing orifices will be, "We bought this ball now we are boss. Get lost, feeble earthlings, and don't let the door hit your asses on your way out!"
That could happen. If so, I can't see any way to prevent it. OTOH, why assume all technologically advanced life-forms are like us?
Because aliens that are all sweetness and light are not funny. Humor has an edge and a shadow, otherwise it's just knock-knock jokes for 5 year olds.
"Should humanity be unified under a single government? Why or why not? If you were required to set up this government, what kind of government would you create? What threats to sustainability would arise and how would you deal with them? I'd love to hear anyone's thought on this."
No, humanity should not be united under a single government. The reason is - variety is the spice of life. Should the unification happen anyway, people will start being sick because spices make food edible and interesting and cosumable. With no variety in life, life will begin to stink and we actually might become prone to throwing up even at times, not to mention suffocation will begin to happen too. Various cultures, ethnicity, different governments, variety in ruling adds spice to living. But any nation will be okay with the canadian water, electrical systems and 4 coil stove cooking ranges and how they keep their dry foods bug free. Aside of that, every nation's specialty should remain. Under one rule, we will not be into living but be into mere existence.
Do you mean to say that every immigrant in the Canada is cooking boiled beef and cabbage, because they're under British-style governance?
Human beings are self centered. We want things. Sometimes we take what we can get in legal ways. We like to tell others what to think, what to say and how to say it. In religion we very often make attempts to shove our beliefs down the throats of others who may not be interested. We demand things.
Well... the above is pretty harsh. When we are in good moods and feeling gregarious, we will be giving and thoughtful but this never lasts. Personal gain sooner or later will enter the picture. Life on this little planet is a struggle. Everything is money, money, money. To secure our futures we need power. OK maybe not personal power but group power. Nationalism will usually provide security for citizens but at what cost?
When the day comes when human beings no longer care about besting anyone else then we might be ready for a single government. in the meanwhile no single authority can answer the needs of all the different schools of thought that exist. We would have to make too many sacrifices, changes.
I'm not ready to "own nothing and be happy". And why not? Because the flavor of living, being alive, would be turned into a stagnant pile of refuse. Life would have lost it's appeal. No challenges, no purposeful direction to aim at.
A single government now, no matter how benign, would rely on a powerful controlling force which would enforce happiness while owning nothing. And this "force" can't exist in a vacuum. A single government now would mean the whole planet being ruled by a small group of men who live apart from the rest of us, protected by geographical isolation. They would have, at their call, a force of police whose duties included running enforcement centers to make sure everyone was happy owning nothing and re-education camps for those who weren't.
And guess who will be the big boys? Just take a look at the self appointed god like men who meet each year in Davos. Yep. A single world government right now would be possible only if it were forced upon the people. And guess who is going to do the forcing? Schwab and company, that 's who.
No thanks... I'll wait until humanity cleans up it's act. Then... a single world government will happen naturally, all by itself. No powerful elites sitting in judgment over the rest of us. None of that.
But event hat existence would be a waste of energy. How are we to advance spiritually if we have no challenges to overcome by beating adversity?
Living on Earth s not easy. There are other planets where human beings don't have it so rough. The benefit here though is that we grow spiritually much faster.
How about we just leave it alone?
We haven't. That's caused the imminent existential threat.
I see. Good luck finding non-foolish leaders!
Some ask "if there are advanced people on the planet why aren't they in positions of authority? Why do they stay hidden? The answer is that by occasionally selecting the less capable we become burdened with the consequences. Overcoming these... is where true advancement comes from.
If a great spiritual master soul were elected president we would be able to rest and relax for a while, heal our wounds. But... we would have lost the opportunities to gain wisdom that conflict brings to us.
The spiritual Law of Harmony through Conflict applies.
I don't understand: more peace, less school? How come?
less war > more peace > less money spent on ordnance > available to spend otherwise; eg food, schools
Sorry, I got it backwards. Now I understand that you meant savings on ordnance and not on school lunches. :lol:
Quoting Jacques
Yeah, nations were always a bad idea.
Quoting Jacques
Such uniformity would be less interesting than we have now, but it's only a matter of time.
Quoting Jacques
I was hoping for a more convivial group, but the dolphins refused to take me along; said white people can't jump.
You're right, there would be disadvantages, (I love diversity too) but I think the advantages would outweigh them.
Quoting Vera Mont
Although I'm not used to being overtaken, I have to admit that you made it. :up: :smile:
The motive is emotion. How we act on it is reasoning. I am just saying that emotion is a necessary part of the equation.
It might be better to charge your
Self-aggrandizement, usually. But that doesn't affect the fact that they base decisions on mathematical calculatimotivation of the computer doesn't alter the math, either.an on. [quote]
I don't think so. There is already one about pie. It's a big, contentious issue. People's attitudes are largely formed by their own relative comfort. The casualties and collateral damage don't get to participate - only the beneficiaries. Doesn't seem fair.
Why would you think a generals motivation is aggrandizement? That may be true for some but I hardly think that is what motivates all generals. No one would willing follow such a general and without followers there not be leaders. A leader must engender a high sense of morale. Morale is what we feel when we believe we arIt might be better to charge your e doing the right thing. Or how about virtues are strength. A general must be virtuous. I am now talking about why we need to rely on humans and not technology. The right values bring out the best in all of us and we need to depend on each other for the best results.
Quoting Vera Mont
A better understanding of capitalism is necessary to answer your question. Research requires money and one of the most important functions of capitalism is providing the capital required for research. Another important function of capitalism is inmotivation of the computer doesn't alter the math, either.an creasing the wealth of small investors. That is to spread the wealth throughout the population and when this happens the standard of living improves.
Quoting Vera Mont
Yes, we need to rely on emotional humans. Moguls have not done what? How do you figure a computer that does not care will improve anything?
What is the advantage of being meaningless and powerless, no more than a part plugged into a mechanical society, no more needed than another identical part?
Why do we do that? What happened to our judgment?
As I said, I also see the disadvantages of uniformity, even though I don't view them as extreme as you do. Ideally, I would like to have both diversity and peace, but given the nature of human beings, it doesn't seem possible to me. Therefore, I have to choose one side over the other. As difficult as it is for me, I would rather give up diversity than peace. Unfortunately, I have no hope of changing human nature, which would naturally be the most beautiful and best solution.
Who knows, maybe after a year of uniformity, I would say: Please give me back diversity, even if it is connected with contempt, hatred and war. Could be, I don't know.
That quote was damaged in the transcription. This was my actual statement:
Quoting Vera Mont
The machine has no life and therefore does not need, want or desire to improve its own life, or make itself richer or more powerful: once the power supply is assured, it doesn't need or want anything for itself.
It has no reason to prevent us improving our lives.
The machine has access to information and the capacity for accurate calculation and prediction, which would be helpful in our efforts to improve our lives.
Emotional moguls, OTOH, have ample motive to prevent us improving our our lives, so that they can reap the benefit of our labour, keep luxuries for themselves, feel important, feel superior, show off bling to one another and control us though fear.
Quoting Athena
You know that's a perfect circle, tight? In a capitalist system, research requires capital and when capitalism supplies the capital, research serves capital.
Capitalists promise a trickle-down benefit to the small investor in their big enterprises (and the small investor in his own enterprise, which, if it is successful enough to compete with them, they will gobble up,) and eventually, even to the minimum-wage worker who will never a get the slightest whiff of an opportunity to invest. It even more or less true. A little trickles down, while a lot is pumped up, with the net result we see today:
Quoting Athena
Take out the Security Council of super-delegates, hand over all the military passwords and ignition keys, close the legal exception loopholes and let 'em do the job.
Didn't I say this on Page 1?
I don't envisage a single giant international government, but a democratic federation of independent states.
I don't think anything in this world is black and white - not even the colours black and white. A momentary choice may be binary - jump or hold on; go after her or stand still; cross the street now or wait. But long term choices are always more complex.
Quoting Jacques
Human nature took a battering under civilization; the artificial constraints and pressures have altered it its shape. Civilization has turned us into domestic animals for the use of various elites. That's why it has such a bad rep. You get a rare glimpse of its real appearance in social media, a much better look in the environment of close community and local initiatives.
Quoting Jacques
You can't, once this
has run its course, there's no separating the colours again.
Why not? Originally, all humans had the same skin color, namely black, from which the different colors developed. Why shouldn't the same be possible again?
Because, it happened through the slow, indirect evolutionary process, not asking or wishing. The evolutionary processes can't be duplicated, because even if we had the technology, we don't know what all the conditions, events, encounters and time periods were.
On a tiny scale, take a box of crayons and melt them in a bowl. Then try to remake all the original crayons.
Sometimes I wonder if we are all suffering from some kind of mass hypnosis.
I don't believe that would be so difficult. You would just need to form two groups and ask one group to only have children with the darkest members, while the other group only has children with the lightest members. In a few generations, you would have two different skin types.
Boundaries are the artificial constructs placed to distinguish "selves": or "us" from "them".
Our nation, their nation, our cuisine, their cuisine, our culture, their culture, our religion, their religion, our class/caste/status, their class/caste/status, our ethnicity, their ethnicity, our language, theirs, our laws, their laws, our wealth, theirs, our resources, their resources, our political views, theirs and so on.
Mine vs. Yours/ Ours vs. Theirs.
They are all dividing constructs that we use to construct self identity. And this fosters any myriad reasons to justify seeing ourselves as different from others on all levels: personal, familial, community, nation, international unions, etc.
I think we have global problems now. Climate change. Inequality. The wealth/privilege gap. We simply cannot resolve these from a divided state of mind, and thus from a divided "state". Unification is the only way forward. Division is chaotic and opposing.
And they would all meekly obey - even though they didn't, under the most egregious apartheid.
That is indeed the most difficult hurdle: how to convince people of the idea, but it is the only one. :joke:
What for? Nobody cares what colour you prefer their skin to be.
Yes, you correctly identified my problem. :lol:
I don't think the problem is uniformity but the total opposite. We have no culture unifying us.
Quoting Jacques
Different cultures mean different expressions of our human nature. To simplify this concept the Hopi are the opposite of the Apache and this difference begins with child-rearing. Cannibalism is another cultural expression and it is taboo to our Western consciousness. I think we need to be very careful when we talk about human nature. I am good with classifying humans as social animals and seeing their commonalities in that way, but I think things like being aggressive or non-aggressive are a matter of culture.
Some Native American cultures shun individuality in favor of identifying with the tribe. I understand this as individuals in the family thinking as though they have very little connection with the family, or members of the family behaving as though family is more valuable than their individuality. This could be what you mean by conformity? Right now my family has one estranged member who is very hostile to the notion of behaving as part of the family. I think our culture has promoted the destruction of family and increased dependency on authority over the people. This has increased our differences and antagonism. There is a difference in what you mean by conformity. Members of the family can be very creative and different without alienating themselves from family.
Doesn't sound like a good idea.
I explain the problem differently. I do not think we have a good understanding of how we think and have taken too much for granted. We were sold education for technology that is destroying the culture we had. We are no longer preparing the young for democracy and liberty. We are not preparing them for independent thinking. We stopped educating the young for good moral judgement and good citizenship. It is my hope if we understand we must learn how to think logically before we can think logically, and that locial thinking is directly associated with good moral judgment, we return to that education to make our democracy strong and moral.
If we replace the autocratic model of industry with the democratic model and return to education for democracy, our democracy could be better than it ever was. That is really fundamental to the manifestation of democracy and having healthy families.
In a way, we are all suffering a kind of mass hypnosis. We have no understanding of the importance of the rediscovery of Greek and Roman civilizations and how that took us out of the dark ages and back on track to evolving our human potential. I think Christianity is one of the strongest factors in destroying the necessary education because Christianity wants all the credit for all the good and it promotes ignorance, especially in Texas where it has a strong influence on schools. But the military is for sure the strongest factor for preparing our young for the Military Industrial Complex and bankers are another layer of the problem, insisting a population be prepared to serve industry before the community receives loans.
Who cares about democracy, not politics, but democracy as a way of life? What are the principles of democracy? How is it manifested? What does culture have to do with the good life, democracy, liberty, and justice for all?
I totally agree it is not a good idea. Diversity is very important to progress and it is good to have communist nations, socialists, and monarchies so we can see what works and what does not.
Germany was our world war enemy and the US have adopted our enemy's model for bureaucracy and model of education for technology and philosophy and is now what it defended its democracy against.
There are some improvements and so problems. We have fought every war for nothing if we do not become aware of those changes.
It was the communist who began income taxes and it was the communist who "liberated" women first. A fully employed population is good for the economy, and those women who are "just housewives" and not good for the economy.
PS it was not gays who destroyed family values. Some of those gays are doing a better job of preserving family values than non gays.
I agree with you that diversity is possible under a single government, even more so under a single municipal administration.
And even more so in a United Nations style loose federation of independent states, who sign on to a charter of human rights and international law. Government doesn't dictate cuisines, dress codes, language or religious observance.