[ExI] Man’s Greatest Achievement – Nikola Tesla on Akashic engineering and the future of humanity

[Anders Sandberg]

On 2015-12-03 11:51, BillK wrote:
> On 3 December 2015 at 11:16, Anders Sandberg  wrote:
>> why care?
>> Because we are talking about ultimate, important things. If we are not as
>> careful with them as we are with mere medicines, explosives or stock
>> markets, should we not expect mistakes to lead to devastating losses of
>> value?
>>
> Errrrrr???  But medicines explosives and stock markets are human disaster areas!
> Humans may pretend (or make feeble attempts) to be careful with such
> as these but fail miserably.
> It is the human good PR intentions versus actual terrible collateral damage.

So, would you prefer a regime where nobody tried to be careful about 
them? Where the doctor gave you the nearest pill bottle and the 
demolitions expert stored his stuff in the front garden? Clearly not: 
imperfect attempts at handling important and dangerous things well make 
things better on average compared to not doing anything. At some point 
it might be too expensive or self-defeating to try to improve safety, 
but that is usually pretty far away from not doing anything.

Similarly, would you be happy with a political system that did not care 
about the relative importance of issues, but just went through issues in 
alphabetical order? "The war? We expect to get to the 'W' section just 
before the Christmas break next year." Again, clearly not. Important 
things, even if they are hard to fix, should be prioritized over less 
important things. We would also want the best thinkers and doers to work 
on the important stuff, rather than the less important stuff.

This is why thinking about things like the meaning of life matters and 
should not be done in a slipshod way. If we get it badly wrong we may go 
down the wrong path, losing tremendous amount of value.


> Yes, Destiny and Fate are usually thought of as predetermined. But as 
> that may lead lazy humans to stop working and say 'Well, what will be, 
> will be' philosophers tend to reason that humans still have to work to 
> achieve their destiny. i.e. work ethic.

You mean like the work ethics of the Calvinists? Who think they are 
predestined to work hard.

-- 
Anders Sandberg
Future of Humanity Institute
Oxford Martin School
Oxford University