From: Wei Dai (weidai@weidai.com)
Date: Wed Dec 31 2003 - 21:39:58 MST
Why are we not faithful servants of our genes? Instead, the defenses our
genes built against parasitic memes are breaking down, resulting in entire
societies falling below replacement fertility rate even as we enjoy
unprecendented riches in technology and material resources. Genes built
our brains in the hope that we will remain friendly to them, and they
appear to have failed. Why? And is there anything we can learn from their
catastrophe as we try to build our own friendly higher-intelligence?
I think the reason we're becoming increasingly unfriendly to genes is that
parasitic memes are evolving too fast for genes and their symbiotic
defensive memes to keep up, and this is the result of a series of advances
in communications technology starting with the printing press. Genes
evolved two ways of ensuring our friendliness - hardwired desires and
hosting a system of mutually reinforcing philosophies learned during
childhood that defines and justifies friendliness toward genes.
Unfortunately for the genes, those hardwired desires have proven easy to
bypass once a certain level of technology is reached (e.g., development of
birth control), and the best philosophical defense for gene-friendliness
that evolution could come up with after hundreds of thousands of years is
the existence of a God that wants humans to be fertile.
This doesn't bode well for our own efforts. An SI will certainly find it
trivial to bypass whatever hardwired desires or constraints that we place
on it, and any justifications for human-friendliness that we come up with
may strike it to be just as silly as "fill the earth" theism is to us.
But perhaps there is also cause for optimism, because unlike humans, the
SI does not have to depend on memes for its operation, so we can perhaps
prevent the problem of human-unfriendly memes by not having any memes at
all. For example we can make the SI a singleton. If more than one SI is
developed, we can try to prevent them from communicating with each other,
especially about philosophy. If the SI is made up of multiple internal
agents, we can try to make sure their internal communication channels are
not suitable for transmitting memes.
Happy New Year!
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jul 17 2013 - 04:00:43 MDT