Chapter 8: Manifesto
Something clicked reading the comparison between mortality to beauty; neither is something that should be reasoned about logically, both are felt deeply and say something about your aesthetic judgment. Most people pass through a consequentialist stage in their moral development, discovering how it feels to lie, cheat, or steal, sometimes using others as a means to an end. For me, a desire for human connection and to feel like a good person soon outweighed any desire to manipulate others. Having somewhat set values and holding yourself to that standard makes you less pervious to the judgments of others. And if you want to feel in community, others usually must be able to trust you, and you them.
I love the idea of need-finding for humanity as a whole, to support more than the individual’s values, but communal, even the globally communal values.
I wonder if the robot laws only became famous because they are so fun to criticize and argue over. Maybe we will have to find an answer to the trolley problem with an international vote before we program this into our robots. We are still extremely excited by and skeptical of the idea of imbuing intelligence, and therefore not at the stage of thinking to cripple this progress.
I like the take from a robot who is given (super) human-level intelligence in “Zima Blue” from Love, Death, Robots. Once intelligent, he starts ceaselessly searching for some meaning, order, or satisfaction in the universe. He found he would himself coming back to a blue square. He realized he would be happiest in his original form as a pool cleaner, making those blue pool tiles shine and taking satisfaction in a job well done. Maybe it’s unethical to give robots this intelligence in the first place.