by Dan | Jan 9, 2023 | Facilitating Post-human Transition Collaboration
We assume that the tech founders who are building artificial general intelligence (AGI) care about safety. The firms closest to creating AGI sure to talk about it a lot. If not for the safety of others, certainly for their employees. Even if they were recklessly...
by Dan | Dec 4, 2021 | Facilitating Post-human Transition Collaboration, Reflecting on What I've Read
Not that long ago I posted an article titled: Arguments Against Friendly AI and Inevitable Machine Benevolence, and it resulted in an interesting dialogue with Ben Goertzel (his comments, and mine, are included at the bottom of the article). This past week I posted on...
by Dan | May 8, 2021 | Facilitating Post-human Transition Collaboration, The Good Must Be Explored
The year is 20,000,000 BC. In a jungle somewhere in Pangaea, a green clearing on the side of a great sloping mountain is made entirely brown. Not by mud or dirt, but by the presence of thousands of apes. Some small, some large. Some with long legs, some with stocky,...
by Dan | May 3, 2021 | Discerning the Good Itself
What matters more, happiness, or suffering? For almost all of us – utilitarians or not – both positive and negative qualia matter, and register when we make decisions about our own lives or decisions that might affect the lives of others. Negative...
by Dan | Nov 14, 2020 | Discerning the Good Itself
This past week I posted the following on Facebook, in reference to my article Where Should Humanity Steer Sentience?: If utilitronium (a conscious, super-blissful substrate) could simultaneously explore future kinds of “the good” (beyond utilitarianism),...
by Dan | Nov 14, 2020 | Discerning the Good Itself
The philosopher David Pearce has posited that the pain-pleasure axis of conscious experience may well be the “world’s inbuilt metric of value,” a kind of ultimate barometer of good or bad. While I agree with Pearce that positive qualia (positive...
