Re: Arbitrarily decide who benefits (was Re: Bounded population)

From: Rolf Nelson (rolf.h.d.nelson@gmail.com)
Date: Mon Apr 14 2008 - 20:20:00 MDT


On Mon, Apr 14, 2008 at 10:00 AM, Tim Freeman <tim@fungible.com> wrote:
> The most important arbitrary feature I can see, for the purpose of
> getting a political consensus to build the thing, is who benefits.

Deciding whose values will be reflected in the decision of who
benefits, may be a less intractable problem than directly deciding who
benefits.

As of 2008, "all currently-living adults", "my tribe", "a
gerrymandered group of people who happen to agree with me", and "me"
are all popular answers for "whose values will be directly respected"
type questions, personally I favor the first of the four choices as an
answer to "what is the initial input to the CEV".

> Otherwise it's arbitrary and there will probably be a tedious and depressing political battle over it.

Even at the small scale, you're going to get people wandering in and
interrupting your work to try to tell you what the Final Status of
North Ireland should be. It may slightly improve things if you have a
Fair Policy laid out where you tell everyone, equally, that such
pre-Singularity lobbying is unfair to other people who aren't
currently in a position to lobby, and that they can lay out their
arguments for why Their Values are the Best through the same CEV
process as everyone else. In other words, nobody, including the
Singularity Team, should get a "head start".

This "Fairness Problem" has two components:

1. What would be a Fair Policy?

2. How can it be made as credible as possible, that the Fair Policy
would actually be followed?

-Rolf



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