In a message dated 2/22/00 3:17:48 PM Central Standard Time,
zero_powers@hotmail.com writes:
> <snip> one of the things I wonder about is what sort of
> life we (plain, trans-, or post-)humans will be allowed by the electronic
> intelligences (I prefer the term EI to AI) once they take over. That will
> depend, of course, on the nature of their ethical or moral systems. I
think
> it's a safe bet to say that they will be driven by a desire to acquire and
> analyze data. I believe they will pick up the baton and run with the
human
> scientific attempt to formulate a grand unified theory of everything.
>
> But what else (if anything) will motivate them? Will there be any "good"
> for them other than information? Any "evil" other than ignorance? Will
> they care at all about such trivialities as emotion, fairness, compassion
> and pain? Whether or not I want to survive the ascendancy of strong EI
will
> depend largely upon this question.
<snip>
My ideas on this subject are fairly well known. I think the notion of real
sentience without emotion is nonsense. We'll certainly be able to build very
intelligent machines that have little or no emotion, but they won't be
sentient; they'll be tools or subparts of larger minds that DO have emotions.
As for "good" and "evil", I think those two will be vital - even central -
concerns to post-human beings. Moral questions are fundamental to life in
society and, unless there is a true "singleton", it seems self-evident to me
that post-human life will have a moral dimension. Likewise, aesthetic life
will continue, albeit amplified. The foundations of aesthetics -- harmony,
dissonance, thematics, dynamics -- will all be matters of concern to beings
with senses -- real and virtual -- in the regimes we inhabit and ones we
can't even imagine.
Greg Burch <GBurch1@aol.com>----<gburch@lockeliddell.com>
Attorney ::: Vice President, Extropy Institute ::: Wilderness Guide
http://users.aol.com/gburch1 -or- http://members.aol.com/gburch1
ICQ # 61112550
"We never stop investigating. We are never satisfied that we know
enough to get by. Every question we answer leads on to another
question. This has become the greatest survival trick of our species."
-- Desmond Morris
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