From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Mon Jan 25 1999 - 13:51:15 MST
"Billy Brown" <bbrown@conemsco.com> writes:
> James Ganong wrote:
> > OK, we've gone over several physical technologies so far, but
> > what about memetics?
> > Could it ever be developed to the point of being an actual
> > technology/engineering discipline?
>
> Of course it could. IMHO, you don't even need nanotech brain surgery to do
> it. People actually seem to be pretty easy to influence, as long as you
> approach the problem the right way. The hard part would be developing a
> technique for testing the effectiveness of competing approaches in an
> objective fashion. Once you have that, experimenters can begin building a
> sound base of knowledge in the field. Once you have enough empirical data
> to be able to say you know how to do some limited set of things reliably,
> you have an engineering discipline.
You mean like the psychology of persuasion/attitude change or
advertisement psychology? Both are areas where quite a bit of serious
reasearch is going on. But most of it is non-memetic, i.e. relies on
direct exposure rather than spread from other people.
> > Why or why not? What could happen if it were so developed?
>
> That's the catch. Memetic engineering would could benefit us all by making
> it possible to build better mental immune systems, weed out false memes more
> reliably, and so on.
Actually, this is an interesting angle to add in the above fields, how
to create a mindset able to resist these methods. There are publishable
research papers in it :-)
> BTW - This is one reason why some of us are so nervous about the idea of
> confronting an SI. Circumstantial evidence seems to suggest that humans
> have very weak mental immune systems. An entity a great deal smarter than
> we are might well be able to exploit those weaknesses to manipulate us into
> doing just about anything, just by engaging in conversation that leads
> subtly in the desired direction.
Note that this is a skill that hinges very sensitively on being able
to participate in human social contexts, judging reactions from small
cues and modelling the reactions of a human. SIs are only dangerous in
this respect if you believe that intelligence is completely general,
and not specialized (which is becoming a more and more common view
among psychologists).
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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