From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Sat Nov 16 2002 - 18:17:42 MST
Alexander Sheppard wrote:
> --but why not just have a system
> where the people who produce something care about producing it because
> they think producing it is important? Instead of having a system which
> is essentially a war of all against all, why not have one where people
> cooperate voluntarily for purposes they see as important? Is nothing
> meaningful to anyone except a threat? Are people really that stupid, and
> the masters really that intelligent? And how is this a humanistic system?
Why not just have a system where instead of anyone *needing* to produce
something, *everyone* just goes off and have whatever kind of fun appeals
to them most, whether that involves producing something or not, and yet
nobody starves and the system doesn't collapse because, well, basically
because the universe they're living in is a nicer place?
Doing that won't be easy - but it'd be a heck of a lot easier than
constructing the kind of system you're proposing *out of humans*.
I know I'm being unfair to the more mature socialists on this list, but
sometimes it still seems to me like the socialists are the ones saying
"why not just have a system where..." and the libertarians are the ones
saying "what's the best system we can build out of..."?
-- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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