[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: This leads us back to the sort of casual, almost throwaway arguments that the golden rule is good because it’s simple, easy to understand, and applies to a lot of situations. It’s easy enough that we can reasonably expect many people will follow it and not cause harm to others. Then you brought up those more exceptional situations – though they might not be that exceptional – where what you want, according to the golden rule extended to others, may not at all align with what they want. Like, if you’re a serial killer or others are serial killers. As we move into the chaotic future, we see that the history of the golden rule involves a slow, often grudging extension of empathy to increasingly wider groups of people. This includes some animals, first men of the same race and community, then reluctantly to women, other races – it’s a disappointingly slow spread of empathy. This probably isn’t adequate for the future’s demands, where we’ll see a proliferation of conscious beings, including problematically conscious ones. As far as we know, all the conscious beings we’re aware of on Earth are evolved creatures who have evolved to enjoy things that contribute to their continued existence: eating, sleeping, mating, and so on.
And all this ignores the notion, under the assumption that it’s reasonable, that there’s no omnipotent creator dictating an overall ethical system. So, there’s no default, God-given ethical system, as far as we can tell. The problem with created conscious beings is that we’ll be able to create beings with a whole different set of priorities than evolved ones. While many of the conscious beings we create might share some of the drives and pleasures of evolved beings, a lot won’t. Then there’s the issue of whether these beings are truly conscious or not, which would require an entire mathematics of consciousness. Take, for example, an AI warehouse guard, which might be conscious but doesn’t care about reproducing, or may be engineered not to care about existing beyond its designed lifespan. It might find pleasure in efficiently guarding the warehouse, not in the things that traditionally give pleasure to evolved beings.
[Recording End]
Authors
Rick Rosner
American Television Writer
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Founder, In-Sight Publishing
In-Sight Publishing
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at http://www.rickrosner.org.
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Rick Rosner 