Sample:
A faith in the possibility of progress through liberal democracy is certainly difficult to sustain in the wake of the failure of a Democratic super-majority to pass health care reform in the United States, the collapse of meaningful climate change negotiations, the hand-wringing impotence of international institutions to intervene against genocide and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and the persistence of myriad forms of popular ignorance and superstition. If I could convince myself that turning our fate over to the enlightened despotism of HAL or Khan Noonien Singh was the only way forward I also would be tempted. I am certainly looking forward to new forms of governance that satisfy my Enlightenment values better than do the existing forms of imperfect liberal democracy. For now, however, I think transhumanists need to focus on achieving our better world through liberal democracy.
4 comments:
What is an unborn human being, Fiona A?
And why should they matter?
Thanks for that, Russell, it's just the kind of thing that I was looking for! It strikes me that Bostrom claims that a "singleton" might arise to deal with international crises. Yudkowsky and others seem to think this will be dandy as the authorities will be friendly artificial intelligences. Yet it seems to me that crises - ie. resource depletion or unstable nuclear states - are likely to erupt long before such intelligences have been made (if, indeed, they can be) and therefore these world orders would be constructed from the self-serving and callous powermongers that we've known and loathed for centuries. Do these guys have a blueprint somewhere that I've just not come across?
Why wouldn't it matter?
The notion of an enlightened elite which "knows" the correct answers is one that history has given the same answer to many times: it is a disastrous delusion.
Information flows and incentives matter for government, as does a sense of common restraints. The notion of the "correct ideas" denigrates restraints, blocks information flows and sets up disastrous incentives. In terms of decent politics, it gets almost everything wrong in, indeed due to, its conviction of its own rectitude.
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