[ExI] chinese colonization of africa etc

[Ben Zaiboc]

On 13/09/2025 13:13, spike at rainier66.com wrote:
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: extropy-chat <extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org> On Behalf Of Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat
> Sent: Saturday, 13 September, 2025 1:37 AM
> To: extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
> Cc: Ben Zaiboc <ben at zaiboc.net>
> Subject: Re: [ExI] chinese colonization of africa etc
>
> On 12/09/2025 22:09, BillK wrote:
>> Well, I can see several morals to this story!
> You could add one more, as the woman, in trying to save her almost-dead baby, was indirectly and inadvertantly responsible for the cessation of the medical supplies and whatever additional deaths and suffering etc.
> that would result.
>
> Compassion can sometimes cause more suffering than it alleviates.
>
> (I wonder, if they had realised the baby was dead during the flight, what they would have done then? Or rather, what would be the logical and most beneficial thing to do?)
>
> --
> Ben
>
> _______________________________________________
>
>
> Ben, there are many dimensions to that story and what my friends were trying to do.
>
> In that place, like many super underdeveloped places, their water source is the one river or stream coming down to the sea.  But humans live all up along the river, and it is their toilet and dishwater up there.  The tide comes in and out, so at high tide the flow is slower and the water has some salt backup, so those drinking from the only source must drink more of it, making them subject to perhaps cholera or other maladies we beat a long time ago.  A lot of them catch intestinal parasites just from drinking the only water source they have.  One can imagine it is that way in a lotta Africa still to this day: people die from insufficient supply of clean water.  CLEAN WATER they cannot get!
>
> We are over here working towards the next generation of faster microprocessor so we can calculate our way to lavish Bitcoin abundance, all the better to anesthetize our collective societal conscience in comfort and luxury, while our neighbors struggle for and fail to achieve a tall glass of clean water.  Mercy.
>
> My friends were taking Santa bags of donated half-eaten penicillin and other mystery meds to some yahoo kinda halfheartedly claiming he knew what they were.  It isn't clear at all to me the effort was a benefit at all, and even my then-teenage self could see it was risky as hell.  What that village really needed was some means of filtering or distilling some clean water from the river, but to have that very long, they would need guns and ammo, and the guns and ammo are even more valuable than the water filter, and heeeere we go again.  It's why they can't have nice things.
>
> Meanwhile... we super sophisticated advanced proles a short distance away are writing software to program our brains to fight each other and tear down the society which gave rise to our comfort, our longevity, our prosperity.
>
> spike

A grim scenario. We really are our own worst enemy.

Which brings me back to a constant theme: We need to have our toys taken 
away, by a more-powerful, actually intelligent, self-aware and hopefully 
benevolent system (or more likely a whole bunch of them), that will sort 
out the mess we have got ourselves into, and if we're lucky, maybe give 
us some less lethal toys to play with. And if we're very lucky, take 
pity on us, pat us on the head and give those of us who want to, the 
means to improve ourselves (and if we're not the least bit lucky, well, 
at least we will leave the world to our 'mind children', instead of 
wiping ourselves out, probably along with any chance of future 
intelligence on this planet).

I've been re-reading some old articles, and one of them talks about "the 
12 pillars of wisdom", basically 12 facets of intelligence, identified as:
1) Visuospatial working memory
2) Spatial working memory
3) Focused attention
4) Mental rotation
5) Visuospatial working memory + strategy
6) Paired associate learning
7) Deductive reasoning
8) Visuospatial processing
9) Visual attention
10) Verbal reasoning
11) Verbal working memory
12) Planning

I don't know how realistic or complete this list is, it's pretty old 
(it's probably missing integrative networks, at least, and I'm pretty 
sure quite a bit of stuff related to embodiment is important too 
(sensorimotor feedback, etc.)), but it seems to be the sort of list of 
mental abilities that we should be working on duplicating in artificial 
thinking systems, to get closer to actual machine intelligence. The 
systems that we currently call 'AI' only display one or two of these 
things, if that.

We can probably, by now, identify the brain regions responsible for each 
of these 12 facets, and maybe even understand how they work, in 
neurologial terms. We certainly have the tools for finding out.

So I can't help wondering who, if anyone, is currently working on this 
kind of thing? It seems to me to be more important than literally 
anything else we are doing. It would be a start, at least.

-- 
Ben