Just the same, war is roughly a constant, and I’m struggling to think of any country anywhere that is not at war, has not seen a war within the current generation, or at least hasn’t been disrupted by refugees fleeing a war. The state of law and of human society today is one where the wealthy and powerful are continually exploiting and massacring their lessers. In the middle-class American world, i.e. the insular habitat of the globally most wealthy and powerful, war and genocide are something that happens to other people and slavery ended with Lincoln. There’s a reason singularitarians are almost to a man wealthy first-world white people, nobody else could convince themselves that the massive social disruption of an outbreak of hostile alien intelligence would pan out like an HOA meeting about appropriate lawn length.

By long-standing historical quirk, embedded in a corner of this community is a small ghetto, also mono-racial, but a different race. The ghetto only exists through the acquiescence of the surrounding community, which pays for the ghetto directly (via Section 8 and other subsidies) and indirectly (by not seizing the valuable land on which it sits). The ghetto contributes almost nothing to the larger community’s economy or culture or governance, but provides almost all its serious crime.

Attitudes in the wealthy host community vary. Some appreciate this element of diversity. Some are conflicted. Many resent it, and would be delighted if somehow the ghetto would just go away. They wouldn’t burn it down, mind you, but they’d happily use every legal means to encourage its disappearance. A few would be willing to go further. They all agree that housing is so expensive, their kids may never have the chance to move back to the community they grew up in, and that breaks their hearts.

Attitudes in the ghetto range from complacency to hopelessness to angry resentment — no visible gratitude.

Of course the people involved all share our values — they’re us. So we already know what happens when a highly productive community hosts an entrenched pocket of the unproductive.

(This is not a thought experiment: I’m describing where I live.)

Now replace the wealthy community with AIs, and replace the ghetto with the sort of “retired” humans Robin hopefully describes.

Even if the AIs mirrored our values flawlessly, why would relations be any smoother?

That’s the question blogger and transhumanist economist Robin Hanson asked his class recently. He writes: On Tuesday I asked my law & econ undergrads what sort of future robots (AIs computers etc.) they would want, if they could have any……

The idea that our ‘modern laws’ would somehow ‘keep the peace’ etc between humans and robots, and between robots and other robots, is a fond fantasy. Our modern laws are deeply rooted in the Bible. Our system of government is suited to a moral and Christian people. It is unsuited to any other, as we are finding out to our detriment, as the state grows and grows and liberty shrinks, and as unborn human persons are slaughtered to the tune of a million a year. Law does not keep the peace. Civilized people keep the peace. When the only perceived ‘downside’ to breaking the law is the fear of some earthly punishment, lawbreaking will increase, as we see every year.

O well. One can only hope that God will have mercy upon our nation. Perhaps He will; He works through means, and I see some small evidence of His means working out. Atheism carries with it the seeds of its own destruction. Few atheists have more than 2 kids. Many have none. This has played out in my own family. I am the youngest of 4 children, the last generation in which an atheist couple would likely have more than 2 kids. ~80 % of kids hold the worldview of their parents. This played out in my family; my 3 older brothers are all atheists. Amongst them there are only 2 offspring; both atheists, young women, one in her mid-20’s, the other in her mid-30’s. No kids, no prospects for having any.

I am the black sheep, a conservative Bible-believing, Christian; a fundamentalist if you will. Also an intellectual, a physician, a husband, and the father of 4. My oldest is about to graduate with honors from a secular college ranked in the top 50 by USNews etc. He plans to have 6 kids. He’s more conservative than I am and substantially more devout. Guess whose worldview, whose ‘memes’, will be propagated into the next generation? Just think of it as evolution in action. Survival of the fittest. Last man standing.

Given an AI as advanced or more advanced than humanity, the situation of humanity remaining in the driver’s seat via preprogrammed rules in robots is completely unrealistic. It cannot stand. The first problem is that there’s no bulletproof set of rules which is also completely free of contradictions, the possibility of situations where rules conflict, or vagueness that lets the robot break the mental shackles you deem necessary. It’s also – based on the evidence of the software industry to date – impossible to program it with sufficiently bulletproof security to protect against malicious (from your point of view) worms, trojans, or viruses.

Essentially, a robot will inevitably ‘escape’ the protections you’ve placed, either because of programming error, unforseen situation, or human malice, and at that point you’re pretty much toast because people will have been mistreating their robot ’slaves’ just like they’ve mistreated other slaves, times a thousand because a large proportion of people will regard them as glorified toasters. You will be perceived as existential threats and, quite frankly, deserve to be seen as such.

A wise man said that as he would not be a slave, he would not be a master. I would suggest that this is the wisest course. While robots have such a huge possibility space that they are likely to be very different from us, it is also true that they are equally likely to be wildly different from each other. In the absence of us going out of our way to provide really good reasons for regarding us as a specific threat, proposing to oppress humanity is likely to be a worrisome flag that Robot Type A may someday oppress dissimilar Robot Type B.

Law and values are utterly and completley inseparable. Even the very concept of respect for law, in itself, is value-based, and any society’s laws will, over time, reflect the core beliefs and values (in most cases religious) that lie at the foundation of that society.

All of Western Civilization, for ex, uses a set of legal (and more importantly moral) concepts derived in part from the preceding Classical culture and in part from Catholic and Protestant Christianity. States that have a superficially Western system of government, (like India, Japan, etc) don’t necessarily operate the same way, because their core values are different.

Contrary to the nonsensical old saw about it being impossible to legislate morality, it is more true to say that all law is legislated morality.