From: Lucas Sheehan (lucassheehan@gmail.com)
Date: Wed Apr 16 2008 - 15:19:40 MDT
On Wed, Apr 16, 2008 at 1:42 PM, Stuart Armstrong
<dragondreaming@googlemail.com> wrote:
> > The two big large contributors to progress have been (i) Rule
> > of Law (ii) Respect for Private Property. These clearly apply
> > only to humans. Cows, for example, cannot understand either,
> > and they have no private property.
>
> This not an argument for depriving them of all rights - some humans
> cannot understand those concept either, and are not treated as chattel
> as a consequence. Though their rights are restricted, they are not put
> to death... And respect for private property is not as popular
> nowadays as it was in its heyday (not to dispute its usefulness, of
> course; but the Lockean maximalist position hasn't been tested in
> modern society, so we can't really say much about it in practice).
>
> Probably similarly to my focus on avoiding negatives rather than
> enhancing positives, I tend to have the philosophy that when there is
> some ethical dilemma, one should ere on the side of giving out more
> rights, IF the cost of doing so is minute. After a singularity, there
> will so much extra resources available, that there will be no need to
> raise and kill cows, hence I'd say the case for granting them
> protection as semi-sentient beings is very strong.
I absolutely agree. It seems we currently have or are very near the
laboratory meat factory now. We can create our food stuffs from
simple building blocks. The cow concern or any other animal/plant we
rely on in the Maslovian sense is almost strictly an economic/social
issue. With the super duper AI, it seems completely a none issue.
Cows live or die outside of the need for food by fitting into the AI's
fulfillment of its perceived needs for us and the cows.
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