[ExI] Private and government R&D

[Rafal Smigrodzki]

On Fri, Jul 24, 2009 at 12:11 AM, Damien Broderick<thespike at satx.rr.com> wrote:
> At 11:03 PM 7/23/2009 -0400, Rafal wrote:
>
>> I keep insisting that a regime based on monopoly and violence
>> will always generate more bad behavior than a polycentric regime based
>> on a principled refusal to initiate violence.
>
> That sounds quite plausible, but I see one tiny problem in testing it.
>
> There's no such thing as a polycentric regime based on a principled refusal
> to initiate violence.
>
> (That I know of.)
>
> (It might be lovely.)

### Well, this same tiny problem existed regarding every single new
idea that men came up with to make our lives better, from the taming
of fire, to the invention of sliced bread.

In the next 50 years it will be possible for our successors on this
planet, whether uploads or AIs, to bind themselves or be bound to any
ethical principles that can be etched in silicon, or diamondoid, or
whatever they run on. About the time that the last human takes his
last breath of nanobot-teeming air, there will be a Cambrian explosion
of minds, and ways of building societies, including structures totally
inaccessible to directly acting evolutionary mechanisms. Intelligent
design will rule.

I bet you 100$ that a society of minds bound to strict in-group
non-violence, with a strong predilection to polycentrism rather than
hierarchy will be one of the stable attractors there. I agree with you
that this unlikely to happen as long as unmodified humans run this
planet, since casual acceptance of violence is the modus operandi of
the modal human but, you know, we are all starry-eyed transhumanists
here, so we can try to look farther ahead than the next 10 election
cycles.

Rafal