RE: Volitional Morality and Action Judgement

From: Lorenzo Hagerty (hagerty@matrixmasters.com)
Date: Mon May 24 2004 - 11:06:00 MDT


At 11:14 AM 5/24/04 -0400, Ben Goertzel wrote:
So far as I can tell, the processes leading to superintelligent AI are
moving much faster than the processes leading to the global maturation
of humanity, leading me to suspect that in fact the former will come
first.

This seems reasonable to me. For example, new findings about the Mayan civilization(s) (going back to the pre-classical in Guatemala over 2,000 years ago) suggests that the decline of their culture can be traced to their poor environmental policies. Here is a civilization that had advanced astronomy and mathematics, yet they failed to understand sustainable agriculture. Their demise should have taught us humans a few things about deforestation, and yet it seems that we are still ignoring the obvious. From this perspective, an AI wouldn't have to be all that intelligent to surpass us :-).

This, of course, raises the issue of what "friendly" AI means ... friendly to humans or to the planet as a whole.

Lorenzo

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