Words&Dirt

“‘What is the Culture? What do we believe in, even if it hardly ever is expressed, even if we are embarrassed about talking about it? Surely in freedom, more than anything else. A relativistic, changing sort of freedom, unbounded by laws or laid-down moral codes, but––in the end––just because it is so hard to pin down and express, a freedom of a far higher quality than anything to be found on a relevant scale on the planet beneath us at the moment.

‘The same technological expertise, the same productive surplus which, in pervading our society, first allows us to be here at all and after that allows us the degree of choice we have over what happens to Earth, long ago also allowed us to live exactly as we wish to live, limited only by being expected to respect the same principle applied to others. And that’s so basic that not only does every religion on Earth have some similar form of words in its literature, but almost every religion, philosophy or other belief system ever discovered anywhere else contains the same concept. It is the embedded achievement of that oft-expressed ideal that our society is––perversely––rather embarrassed about. We live with, use, simply get on with our freedom much as the good people of Earth talk about it; and we talk about it as often as genuine examples of this shy concept can be found down there.'”

––The State of the Art, by Iain M. Banks, pg. 161-2

“I don’t think there are any magic bullets to resolve the dilemmas of AGI ethics. There will almost surely be no provably Friendly AI, in spite of the wishes of Eliezer Yudkowsky and some others. Nor, in my best guess, will there be an Artilect War in which pro-AGI and anti-AGI forces battle to the death with doomsday machines, as Hugo de Garis foresees. But I don’t pretend to be able to see exactly what the outcome will be. The important thing, as I see it, is that the human race has a whole engages as closely and intelligently as possible with AGI as it evolves––so that, as AGI comes about, it’s not a matter of ‘us versus them,’ but rather a matter of AGIs and humans, that have become inseparable on various levels, moving forward together into new realms of science, technology, interaction, and experience.”

–– “Artificial General Intelligence and the Future of Humanity,” by Ben Goertzel, The Transhumanist Reader: Classical and Contemporary Essays on the Science, Technology, and Philosophy of the Human Future, eds. Max More and Natasha Vita-More, pg. 136