[extropy-chat] Sympathy in superintelligences, Re: Singularity Blues

[Edmund Schaefer]

On Apr 6, 2005 12:41 PM, Samantha Atkins <sjatkins at mac.com> wrote:
> The payoff?  I am not posthuman but I imagine it might include simply
> the sense of repayment and satisfaction of helping one's root/parent
> species continue and evolve to the maximal extent it or its members
> can.

That sense of repayment and satisfaction exists in humans because it
was once genetically adaptive in our hunter-gatherer environment.
There's no reason to expect it to exist in posthumans, especially not
in AIs. Humans don't even feel it across species lines. We are
"transcended" amphibians. Going back far enough, we have common
ancestry with frogs, cockroaches, and infectious bacteria, but we
extend no sympathy to them. Heck, we have a hard enough time not
killing other humans, let alone helping other species along. We can't
rely on a posthuman desire to repay humans for having created them.