Re: [sl4] Re: Property rights

From: Bryan Bishop (kanzure@gmail.com)
Date: Tue Jul 08 2008 - 16:13:03 MDT


On Tuesday 08 July 2008, Lee Corbin wrote:
> Bryan writes
> > Lee wrote:
> > > I posit that in many cases the people simply are not capable of
> > > self-rule or are absolutely too unprepared for it by their own
> > > cultural history. We also can surely judge that this was the case
> > > in many historical societies we're aware of.
> >
> > I'm wondering what makes you think that nations and governments
> > somehow magically (vitalism) makes it so that these same unprepared
> > people are able to come together and somehow make it so that they
> > are prepared. It's simply not true.
>
> Yes it is!  Yes it is!  :-)

Oh, okay. How's that death thing working out for you? Kinda sucks, eh?

> Yes, but millions of people (so far in history, given their own
> limitations and their upbringing and their cultural baggage) simply
> NEVER spontaneously go from domination of elites and a great King
> towards any sort of self rule.

They already are able to behave in whatever way their brains come up
with, to the extent that the implementation is available and so on, and
whether or not they would survive a switch wasn't what I was hoping at
getting at -- remember, we were talking about "Solar System
Governments" (your words) and the general ai domination scenarios (my
characterization) that are thrown around here, one ai to rule them all
and such. Specifically we were talking about 'property rights' and I
was wondering how it is that you want an ai to behave in some
characterized manner with respect to them (hint: the characterization
is actually incomplete but nobody admits this methinks). All of these
layers -- ai domination, property rights, governments, these are just
layers on top of the individual agents, and these layers are by no
means 'magical', they can be created, recreated, destroyed, and most
importantly redesigned, and they tend to show up on their own. Look at
all the random micronations, perhaps. Anyway, these layers can be
likened to onion layers, which are wrapped around the actual thing that
we are all interested in here -- intelligence, i.e. that person walking
around with a skull and all of those silly social dynamics issues that
we don't really care about. We're here for whatever the hell that
intelligence is. All of the hypotheticals about implementation of an ai
dominated society are ridiculous -- it doesn't actually have anything
to do with intelligence. Whether or not people happen to not know how
to live isn't the issue (in truth, nobody does anyway); if you're
afraid people will die, fine, let's go engineer solutions to those
problems, but let's not mix it up with the task of ai engineering and
design. :-)

> I'm surprised that by now you aren't starting to be just a bit
> frustrated by how your own impeccably logical ideas don't seem to be
> affecting thousands, yet alone millions, of fellow Americans.  They
> just look at things differently.  Evolution takes a long, long time.

I am not confused. What are these "impeccably logical ideas" that you
neglect to mention ? In other words, just what is it that you are
expecting of me?

- Bryan
________________________________________
http://heybryan.org/



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