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mlhoheisel's avatar

Evolutionary Psychology has something called an Evolutionarily Stable Strategy (ESS) that's about genetic code for a sort of behavior that moves within the gene pool between upper and lower bounds created by a feedback mechanism.

Psychopaths may fit this ESS model and seem to be about 1% of the general population, though a large fraction of the prison population.

It may be worth noting that when generalizing about sympathy, there may be more than one sort of human. Millions of people now may have no more sympathy for other humans than an alien AI even while normal humans in fact base a lot of behavior on sympathy and altruism. Psychopaths have great advantages under some circumstances and are disfunctional under others.

If in fact there's a distinctive hidden sub population that thinks quite differently it makes a difference to these issues. It may not be possible to just assume everyone's reactions are the same. Even if most people are repulsed by violence and cruelty all people are not. For some it's very natural and easy.

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Brian Slesinsky's avatar

I think that even if we didn't know exactly how ems work and could only make crude changes at first, the fact that we can run them on computers would make experiments much easier, and therefore a cornucopia of modifications would be much easier. For one thing, we can easily see what happens with a particular change, and then reverse it and try again - not so easy with real animals!

So even if we didn't understand minds all that well before ems came along (and I think that's unlikely), we would quickly learn a lot more just because doing brain science got much easier.

But even that is giving human ems too much of a head start. It seems likely that ems would work well enough to be scientifically useful long before they are fully working and safe enough to use "in production". (That's usually the case in science.) Caution about ethical issues would make more machine-like ems easier to deploy and it seems likely that they'd become economically significant much sooner.

So even if the science evolved in a direction that would eventually make human ems likely, it might still result in not much of an economic niche remaining for them by the time they arrive.

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