RE: Friendliness and blank-slate goal bootstrap

From: Ben Goertzel (ben@goertzel.org)
Date: Sun Jan 11 2004 - 09:39:31 MST


HI,

I think that "having respect for all the universe's potential", is perhaps
included in "Friendliness to sentient beings past, present and future"
["past" included to cover the possibility of time travel ;-) ]

Ben

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-sl4@sl4.org [mailto:owner-sl4@sl4.org]On Behalf Of Philip
> Sutton
> Sent: Sunday, January 11, 2004 10:40 AM
> To: sl4@sl4.org
> Subject: RE: Friendliness and blank-slate goal bootstrap
>
>
> Hi Ben,
>
> As you would guess I like the goal of "Friendliness to humans and other
> sentients" more than simply "Friendliness to humans". I think AGIs will
> like it better too.
>
> However I think that there is a wider goal under or over "Friendliness to
> humans and other sentients" that is shared by many people and that is
> probably important in shaping the future - and that is for each sentient
> being to "have respect for all life and for life's potential" (ie whether
> living things are sentient or not). When I use the word 'respect' I mean
> this in the sense of having "sympathetic regard for the needs,
> preferences and feelings of others".
>
> This goal could be qualified in that perhaps different forms of
> life could
> be given more or less regard. Perhaps sentients would be given more
> regard and microorganisms less. But this idea of "having respect for all
> life and for life's potential" allows us to have regard for non-sentient
> living things as well as sentient ones.
>
> In fact the idea of "having respect for all life and for life's
> potential"
> could be generalised even further if a grading of the intensity
> of respect
> is alowed for....to become: "have respect for everything and for its
> potential" So a superpowerful AGI moving about the universe could
> have a deep itch to respect all of its parts and their potential
> - even in
> areas where/when life does not yet exist.
>
> This notion might be a tricky one to apply at this level of
> extension. We
> might need to buy in a bit of advice from...say the Dalai Lama (!) or
> somebody of great wisdom from a non-mystical background. :)
>
> Cheers, Philip
>
>



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jul 17 2013 - 04:00:45 MDT