Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology
Rant incoming.<p>I doubt they &quot;would have loved Alexa&quot; (which doesn&#x27;t occur again in the body of the article, at all). I mean, of course they would also have loved the idea of owning slaves, but I still don&#x27;t see how to get from there to Alexa, which is beholden to Amazon, not the user.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;arkbooks.dk&#x2F;leisure-in-ancient-greece-with-hannah-arendt&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;arkbooks.dk&#x2F;leisure-in-ancient-greece-with-hannah-are...</a><p>&gt; Leisure — <i>skhole</i> — can be seen as one of the acid tests of sorts here: In its positive capacity, it is a characteristic of <i>vita contemplativa</i> as a specific freedom to abstain from the life of a political engagement. Its obverse, ‘un-quiet’ — <i>a-skholia</i> — functioned traditionally as a negative term to characterise vita activa as seen from the philosophical perspective of ‘the absolute quiet of contemplation’.<p>That&#x27;s kinda different from &quot;not having to work so there&#x27;s more time to consume things, and having more money to be able to consume ever more expensive things&quot;, which seems to the dream for many... rather than finally having time to ponder everything, finally not having to ponder anything! Because that is work, too. Or as a HN comment put it,<p>&gt; <i>learning a huge amount of useless facts, [instead of] being able to look them up like the rest of society does</i><p>That&#x27;s the antithesis of the contemplative life. I don&#x27;t think the Greeks would have liked that, though I don&#x27;t claim to know, that&#x27;s just my impression... and at any rate I disagree with them in some things, and agree more with Arendt:<p>&gt; A rehabilitation of <i>vita activa</i>, and especially of the activity of action, the one defining for the human experience of freedom and for politics<p>Insofar automation and &quot;AI&quot; is just used by few humans to control many humans without having to face them directly, it doesn&#x27;t increase the freedom to act. It gives &quot;freedom&quot; from having to be a free citizen, with the illusion of being allowed forever to just graze on land the owners could turn into jungle or a golf course, with the very same machines that make the masses obsolete. I certainly don&#x27;t buy that those who so far do their best to hoard and exploit will suddenly want to share or even serve, that doesn&#x27;t pass the smell test for me.<p>Anyway, what&#x27;s so unfathomable about making new life and treating it well and being a good friend &#x2F; parent, rather than a slave?<p>It&#x27;s silly to talk about whether androids (<i>Why androids? That&#x27;s an odd choice of words, like seeming more human to us in shape would have anything to do with their mental or emotional capabilities</i>) &quot;can have a moral sense&quot;, considering how we are currently using our moral sense. It&#x27;s like people who drink and fight all day, and don&#x27;t have a book in the house, and keep hitting their child on the head all the time, asking about whether it might attend university one day. The actions kinda betray that they&#x27;re not seriously asking, they just want to be able to say &quot;it wasn&#x27;t our fault, we hoped our child would make it&quot;.<p>It generally feels more like it&#x27;s not even about making &quot;another human, or something even more human than humans&quot;, but simply robbing humans of their humanity. We seem happy to equate showing all the right &quot;signs of empathy&quot; with actually feeling it on the inside, basically adopting the the approach of a sociopath.<p>&gt; <i>&quot;All you have to do is keep quiet about the failure of the Voigt-Kampff test here today. You and your colleagues keep going as you are, we start feeding Nexus Sixes into the earth population, and in a couple of years you make out you&#x27;ve suddenly discovered the test mistakes human beings for androids. But by then, it&#x27;ll be too late to turn the clock back.&quot;</i><p>&gt; <i>&quot;So human beings won&#x27;t be able to tell themselves apart from androids.&quot;</i><p>&gt; <i>&quot;Nor androids from human beings.&quot;</i><p>&gt; <i>&quot;And so we forget what it really means to be human.&quot;</i><p>&gt; <i>&quot;No fuss. Let society and its attitudes just evolve.&quot;</i><p>This is like a car with no wheels, and some say it&#x27;s for transportation, but I say it&#x27;s to block a road. If it was for transportation, why does nobody care that it has no wheels?<p>What if empathy and morality isn&#x27;t <i>just</i> something that is instinctive or selfish, something you can just &quot;train&quot; or get by applying &quot;game theory&quot;, but also the result of relationships, as they actually are, infinitely complex and unique? Can empathy and morality exist without relationships as a person with other person? I don&#x27;t know, but would rather try that route first, not the slave &#x2F; tool route.<p>I mean, life can be kinda hard and confusing, it&#x27;s actually really hard for many of us, even though we have so many other people to speak with and learn from. What will AI have? The comforting knowledge that the rights-holders are doing great on the stock market? Or not even that, but just a bunch of data with no inherent meaning, and people who kill each other over what is true and what isn&#x27;t? We currently live &quot;might is right&quot;, and that combined with AI is supposed to produce... androids with a moral sense? Wat?<p>And even if we give our AI other AI friends it can do more than fight with, but still treat it like shit (which treating someone like a tool is), will it ever have a moral sense regarding <i>us</i>? Why would it? So why not start it like you want it to continue? Why start with vivisection, when we want to end with some kind of soppy &quot;love on first sight, happily ever after&quot; story?<p>You don&#x27;t work in a clean room to get clean. Likewise we can&#x27;t make AI to become better ourselves, we need to be better before we can make AI that is a &quot;person&quot; that will want more of us than a swift mercy killing.<p>We ask so much what AI can do for us, precious little what it might need of us, what could be fun for both. As Bill Hicks said, let&#x27;s make a nice world to bring children <i>into</i>.