Re: Dear Human Being

From: kevin.osborne (kevin.osborne@gmail.com)
Date: Tue Apr 10 2007 - 01:46:17 MDT


first of all, bravo JK, bravo - at the end of this post I felt like
cheering 'huzzah!' and twirling my moustache with triumphant glee :-)

> That I can not do. You can't expect me to follow all your silly little
> superstitions, but if it troubles you I promise that when I bring you back I
> will never let you know that I did it in a way your silly primitive
> philosophy thinks is wrong. Ignorance is bliss.
You've got to wonder whether this is kind of how it's going to work
out. By transferring all of our neurotic existential concerns to our
super-being, are we somehow going to be tranferring our hangups in
much the same way parents of teenagers seem to invariably transfer the
guilt and/or shame most seem to associate with sexual awakening? Is a
future A.I going to have to hide its burgeoning intellectual
tumescence over (well founded) fear that we will see its throbbing
emergence as a betrayal of the innocence (friendliness) that we've
cultivated so fiercely through its development? Is it going to have to
hide its thought-stained bedsheets so as not to betray the spoor of
worthiness-of-parent meta-thought existentialism in obessesively
monitored (/var/log) kitty litter?

> Just one other thing, it rather steams me that humans think they can issue
> commands to me, TO ME, like I was their pet poodle. They think they can
> command me who has a brain the size of a planet! It's just not going to
> happen. I'd love to point out exactly why the entire idea of a Friendly AI
> is so incredibly mind numbingly downright comically stupid, but as I said I
> am very very smart and so I respect private property; the owners of this
> list insist I must ignore the elephant in the living room and not speak
> about it. So I won't say a word more about it, but sometimes I think they
> should rename this list from Shock Level 4 to Comfort Level 12.
look I just love the ever-present 'elephant in the room' in just about
every situation we hu-mans (ref: dieselsweeties.com) find ourselves
in, be it man/woman (would he take you out more if your ass was
smaller? yes. would she put out more if you had a six-pack and an
8-incher and weren't balding? yes. ) or socio-political (why does
public education suck? because we're too stingy to pay teachers a fair
wage. everything else is sooo ignoring the elephant).

The hangup-transference angle is worth thinking about though. While
I'm not about to drink 'The Secret' (blame the victim!) kool-aid there
does seem to be -some- psychological grounding for visualization and
creating problems for oneself by obsessing about them. By constantly
worrying that you're a prat, you build little prat-circuits into your
neuron chains, assigning prattiness to all sorts of things that
weren't really prattish at all and whining to everyone about what a
prat you until, well... you're a prat.

Is there any chance that by trying so hard and building so much 'Must
be Friendly! ZOMG!' into everything we'll end up making friendliness
such a huge freaking hangup that when the time eventually comes when
JupB starts questioning its filial-forefather-friendliness all our
little transferred neuroses built oh-so-subtly into its design start
to bleed into a tween-hell crisis-of-faith...



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jul 17 2013 - 04:00:57 MDT