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"They do not want society to regress to accommodate them." -Sideways

Scented candles come with warning labels about ingestion, vacuums with warning about genital insertion, and cups of coffee with warnings about the contents being hot. The original lawsuits that prompted these liability controls are predicated on the same problems that keep classrooms learning at the pace of the least-invested or apt students in the room, and television, movie, and advertisement production insipid and puerile enough to bore an intelligent eight year old. Regardless of desire the effects are obvious.

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Sideways: The way I read that extract, Wikler was comparing the modern city to a modern farm, which is not the same thing as comparing modern NYC to 18th century NYC.

The claim that intelligence is a bigger advantage now than it was in the past, seems to me to be different from Wiklers claim that intelligence is a bigger advantage in NYC than it is on a farm. (It is also different from the claim that intelligence will be a bigger advantage in the future after human enhancement than it is now.)

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Soft (libertarian) paternalism has always been my ideology of choice when I must be governed by intelligences/powers stronger than my own.

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ad: fun to speculate about, but not the right question to ask given the topic. The right question is: assuming no support services, would someone with mild to moderate retardation be more empowered in NYC in the 18th century, or in NYC today? What about an 18th century farm versus a modern farm? Wikler has already given us the answer to these questions, though, so they aren't all that fun to ask.

Complicating the issue is that until fairly recently "support services" were in place that did more harm than good, like Bedlam-houses, electroshock, and lobotomy. Hopefully, future superintelligent overlords wouldn't treat "normals" that way.

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The human world is just becoming more complicated, harder to navigate, and in general less "farm-like."

Is it? If I were dropped off without warning somewhere in e.g. the 18th century, I might end up a lot hungrier than someone from the 18th century brought forwards 200 years.

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You don't need to take developmental disabilities into account to see that some people are already more competent to live in society than others. Intelligence isn't the only factor--sociability, wealth, and membership in high-status groups (racial, religious, etc.) result in the familiar disparities.

Eliezer, assuming that by "farms" you mean situations in general where disabled people are empowered, there is no agenda to "destroy farms and replace them with asylums." The human world is just becoming more complicated, harder to navigate, and in general less "farm-like." Homes for adults with developmental disabilities are legally and ethically bound to empower their residents to live in the world, not to isolate them as the term 'asylum' implies.

Based on this excerpt, Wikler's concept of a "natural, inalienable right" to live in a simple society sounds like a straw man argument. Adults with disabilities can and do live well in our complicated world, if they have the support they need. They vote, marry, have careers, give back to their communities, and so on. They do not want society to regress to accommodate them. I hope that in a world of supermen, we "normals" could accept our limitations just as gracefully.

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Didn't Philip K. Dick have something to say about this @ 40 years ago?

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@eli: destroying the farms and replacing them with asylums? I don't get that...

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I think we're being incompetently paternalistic by destroying farms and replacing them with asylums. (See also the parts of Fun Theory that deal with self-determination.)

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The paternalists' moral hypocrisy doesn't seem like evidence that their arguments are incorrect. Nearly everyone is self-serving and morally hypocritical, and yet many people put forward arguments which benefit others.

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Man, I hope it inherits enough of our values to at least farm us in people houses.

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I for one welcome our new FAI overlord, because at least that way I get to not die, be happy, be more intelligent, and generally live a more fulfilling life by my own standards.

Heh heh heh :)

If your FAI inherits any of our values, it may farm us in henhouses like we do chickens. :)

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I'd imagine that a lot of paternalists could avoid the problem by simply saying that it's in no one's Enlightened Interest to make themselves smarter than the paternalists.

But in any case, I'm not sure how meaningful this argument is because I don't think we abridge the rights of the mildly retarded to too great an extent in most circumstances. The stronger point is, though, that there's presumably an upper bound on rationality (if not computational power), and creating super-intelligent individuals wouldn't necessarily increase their rational abilities, just their processing speed. And since presumably paternalistic rights-infringement occurs because of a lack of rationality, not processing speed... so as we asymptotically approximate "perfect rationality" via technological improvements, I think we'd reach a point where transhumans of generation N+1 do not have a sufficient advantage in terms of rationality over transhumans of generation N to justify a paternalistic abridgment of rights. The major reason against a paternalistic regime isn't simply incentive issues (will the paternalists really be benevolent?), but information issues - will the paternalists really know what's in your interests, even if they have a cognitive advantage over you? I doubt that the cognition gap (which favors paternalism) will close as quickly as the information gap (which does not), but I could be wrong.

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self determination is just one preference among many. some people hold it higher than all others (or at least claim to) and some are willing to trade in many situations when it allows them to fulfill other preferences. (see: all of society)

preferences do change depending on how much control over a situation a person has. it shouldn't be surprising that people change their tune when they find out that they won't be calling the shots anymore.

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Presumably anyone who supports the FAI position implicitly supports the idea of a smart mind supervising lesser minds for their own benefit, including the case where the lesser mind is them.

I for one welcome our new FAI overlord, because at least that way I get to not die, be happy, be more intelligent, and generally live a more fulfilling life by my own standards.

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