Topic: Machines and money - page 9. (Read 12830 times)

In this case you are obviously misusing the word "excellent" (as synonymous to "perfect" to some extent), the word "good" seems to be a choice that fits your idea better and, at the same time, still leaves room for improvement.

Why do you think there is a difference? How does mistreating people make them more profitable? First you say people will use guns and then you say machines should use guns. All I'm saying is that the machines will own the guns and it doesn't matter who wields them. They will hire forces only if they are perceived to be fair. People still have the power to choose to stop using electricity and turn off the machines, but people will choose not to do so.

Ah, no, I didn't want to go that far.  To me, a master is excellent, if the imposed behaviour on the slave is resulting in better sensations for the slave than when the slave were free.

The children example is good.  Good parents are not error-free.  But in general, good parents impose behaviour upon their children such that the children are over all happier than if they would let them do anything they like (and hurt themselves, for instance).

In other words, when the master makes LESS errors than the slave, I consider that already as excellent.

If I forbid my kid to play with a sharp knife, I'm probably an excellent master

Though you could still say that excellence itself denies freedom of action, since freedom of action inevitably implies the possibility of error, but excellence and error are also mutually exclusive.

To follow up:

there ARE some situations where there are excellent masters: good parents.  Good parents are masters over their children, that is, children are to obey their parents and are in a form of slavery.  But the empathy of good parents towards their children is such, that the parents, by their own desire, try to optimize the happiness of their children.  This is one of the few "excellent master" relationships that be, and they are based on a very high dose of empathy.  And when children grow up, they leave the "slave" status.
Parents can be excellent masters, in that they know better than their children themselves, what is good for them, and will hence impose behavior such that the children are actually happier "as a slave" than when they would have total freedom of action.

Yes, that was my point.

It was because someone was saying that machines would be EXCELLENT masters.  I was trying to point out the absurd concept of excellent master.

That's why my first text started with: "I don't know why you think that machines will be excellent masters. " 

So why wouldn't they take over all the power with the excellent guns they make themselves ?  Why would they tolerate us, and not treat us like cattle, or pets ?

If machines have any desires, why wouldn't they impose them with guns, instead of trying to buy us ?  Like people do (states, I mean) ?

So your theory of slave excellence doesn't hold. The complete excellence implies freedom of action and denies slavery since these notions are mutually exclusive. If you have excellence, you can't have slaves. If you have slaves, then you are not excellent. As simple.

Ah, but that is universal.  We are not free in choosing our sensations.  They are an external given (and a big mystery, as I said).  We do not DECIDE or CHOOSE whether getting a blow of a hammer on our big toe hurts or not: it HURTS.  That's a given.  There's no choice in our good and bad sensations.  If we have good sex with a sexy partner, then we enjoy this: that's also not a choice, it happens to be so.

We can choose our actions, but we cannot determine our sensations.  We cannot change whether certain perceptions are enjoyable or hurt.  It just happens to be so.  By taking actions, we can try to pursue them or not.  We can try to project (and make mistakes or not) whether certain outcomes of our actions will result in enjoyable sensations.  But we cannot modify the "enjoyability" of certain sensations.  Sensations simply ARE enjoyable or not.  It is an external given.

We can try to avoid someone hitting our toe with a hammer, because we know that it would be a nasty sensation.  Or we could in a stoic way undergo the hammer blow.  We could try to seduce a sexy partner with the view on good sex, or not.  This is our freedom.  But whether the hammer blow hurts, and the sex is enjoyable, is not our choice.  Our choice resides in wanting to pursue this or not.

Empathy is the remarkable phenomenon whereby an individual undergoes excellent sensations by observing (or supposing) that another individual undergoes good sensations.  Empathy, like any other sensation, is also an external given.  You can have empathy or not towards another individual, but you do not choose this.  It just "happens" (or it doesn't).  Like you fall in love (or you don't).  You do not decide that.  You can decide upon actions as a function of those externally given sensations, in trying to pursue whatever you think will obtain you more good sensations.  But you cannot pick those sensations.

That's fine, but the machines will hire well paid and well armed contractors to prevent such an event. Besides, they will own the best gun manufacturers you buy from.
Like I said, the machines will pay their employees fairly. They will have adequate pleasures. Does anyone really get more pleasure from two Maybachs than one? How many cars can you drive at once? Machines will make more logical and fair choices than human capitalists.

You were not saying it directly, but this doesn't make your assumption less self-contradictory. You say that the master experiences excellent sensations only if the slave also experiences excellent sensations. Thus you deprive the master of freedom in choosing his own actions, since it is also a sensation (in a way), but this would inevitably interfere with his other excellent sensations (which are mirrored from the slave sensations), unless the slave is also granted the same freedom (which effectively eliminates the concept of excellent slavery).

You simply can't have it both ways.

That is not the way in which people take power over other people.  Power is something that comes out of the rifle of a gun.


What does "profit" mean without a pleasure principle ?  Profit is a way to maximize good sensations through economic interactions, right ?  You need a utility function to determine profit, and a utility function means a pleasure principle.
Without pleasure principle, you cannot define a utility function, and hence no profit.

That's not what I'm saying.  I am saying that an EXCELLENT master is such, that he imposes behaviour they see fit on their slaves SUCH THAT the slave has himself excellent sensations.  That's the definition of an excellent master.  If the slave would have better sensations free than as a slave, the master wouldn't be excellent.

As any master imposes behaviour "they see fit", they do this in agreement with their (projected) OWN excellent sensations.  So for both to happen simultaneously, it must be such that what the master experiences as excellent sensations himself, corresponds to what the slave also experiences as excellent.  That can only happen if there is a lot of empathy from the master to the slave, because otherwise there's no chance that the master's excellent sensations coincide with those of the slave.



Of course.  I don't think that excellent masters can exist in general, whether they are machines or humans :-)

I was only pointing out what needed to be the conditions for a machine to be an EXCELLENT master.

By "master" of course the machines will have no power over anyone other than being our employers. There's no "pleasure principle" involved, just business. Do what they say or don't. Your neighbor will take your place. Everything will be pretty much the same as today except that machines will just make business transactions that make themselves the most profit. That means they must be perceived as fair or humans will stop using them. As long as most people accept their competency and expertise, they will grow in usage and power to make more money for themselves.

This has nothing to do with humans making profits or free market capitalism. Machines will do the most logical thing and be as productive as possible. They will not waste money on unnecessary frivolity. Nor will they force austerity. They won't read Tony Robbins or Zig Ziegler. They won't use NLP or double-speak. They will make good scientific decisions that increase profits, profitability, and economic expansion. That's what programmers will endeavor to strive for because like Bitcoin, open competition is the most efficient form of trade.

This has nothing to do with capitalism or communism. Marx never envisioned the power of networked machines. Friedman may have seen electronic cash coming, but he didn't follow the cypherpunks. At the risk of sounding too hipster, this is an emergent paradigm shift stemming from fundamental new technologies.

This part is self-contradictory. You say that "masters" impose the behavior they see fit onto their slaves so that "an excellent master has himself good sensations in agreement with the sensations of the slave", but at the same time you deny the slave the freedom in determining his own actions. This way you also implicitly deny the master the same freedom of determining his own behavior.

To put it another way, freedom of action is a necessity for both the master and the slave (unless slaves revolt in the end, or masters are not "excellent), but this effectively destroys the concept of master and slave as you see it.

I don't know why you think that machines will be excellent masters.  There are a few things to consider when you want to know what "excellent master" wants to say.  The first thing to consider, is the concept of "desire" and "drive", which is at the origin of the concepts of "good" and "bad".
After all, we humans have desires, because there are things we experience as enjoyable (say, having good sex), and others, as not enjoyable (say, being tortured).  Why this is so is a big mystery, but it happens to be like this, that we humans experience some things as enjoyable and others as painful. This experience is the root of what can be called "good" and "evil". Good is what provides us with enjoyable sensations, and evil is what brings us painful experiences (no matter what religious zealots try to tell us ).  Without the concept of good sensations and bad sensations, there would be no notions of "good" and "evil": water molecules don't mind being split, for instance.  Bad sensations also correspond to everything that has to do with our destruction (death) of which we have usually very negative projections and which we associate with bad experience.
You have to see "sensations" here in a very large sense: thoughts, projections, empathy, .... Not just the direct physical sensations, but also whether we find friendship enjoyable, whether we find our job enjoyable, whether we find helping others enjoyable and so on. 

Ethics is nothing else but to try to generalize the individual "good" (= enjoyable sensations) en "bad" (= painful sensations) into collective enjoyable and painful sensations: while something might be "good" for an individual, it can cause a lot of "bad" for many other individuals, and as such, is ethically rejected, while something that can bring "good" to a large number of individuals, is seen as ethically positive.

Individuals will take actions to pursue their own good sensations (in the large sense), and economy is the interaction of all these individual choices to pursue their own good.  So in a way, economics is practical ethics.

But in order for all of this to make sense for machines, they have to have something similar to "good" and "bad" sensations. 

Now, "being a master" (not in the sense of magister, but in the sense of sense of dominus) implies that machines impose, by the threat of violence, a behaviour onto their slaves, and being an excellent master, means that imposing this behaviour actually improves the good sensations with the slave over what the sensations would be if the slave had freedom in determining his own actions.  An excellent master has hence himself good sensations in agreement with the sensations of the slave (has a high degree of empathy towards the slave) - otherwise the master would have no reason to be excellent.

I wonder how this could come about with a machine.

In as much as machines would have own desires and good sensations, and hence determine what they want, I don't see how this could have empathy towards us.

To begin with, the rest of the world cannot agree on what self-awareness (consciousness) is, and you give a "definition" from Wikipedia. Besides, if you read my post carefully, I had said that it seems that self-awareness is inseparable from free will. In fact, I don't know but tend to think so. Without consciousness what you pass for an AI would actually be a robot, i.e. a "computer with hands attached to it".

But for the moment, how are you going to "program" an abstract thought?

If you think self awareness is inseparable from free will, you're free to think that. I don't think the rest of the world agrees. That said, even if that was true, the point is that intelligence comes in many different forms, you don't need to satisfy every single point to be called "intelligence". Thus you can have AI without free will.

Your last point I don't even see how to address, except to say that it's flat out wrong, but even if it wasn't, it's a complete red herring.

I'm not the one confusing different ideas, you're the one drawing boundaries and giving definitions that simply isn't how they're normally used.


EDIT: And to take a hundred steps back, even assuming everything you pointed out is correct, even if I used the wrong words to describe what I am trying to say, so what?

All I wanted to say is that we should be careful and only create machines that will be beneficial to human society, not artificial beings that will destroy humanity or become our overlords. There's no need to pick on my choice of words.

The notion of free will seems to be inseparable from the notion of self-awareness. I have nothing against you personally (to clarify this point), but this doesn't in the least excuse you from confusing different ideas (e.g. abstract thought vs programming, which are mutually exclusive).

I don't know what you have against me.

There is no mention of free will anywhere in that, is there. There are many different types of intelligence, and we only need to develop machines in certain areas of intelligence that will prove to be useful to us and not in areas where it might harm us.

A machine can possibly be programed to be able to learn and have the capacity for logic and abstract thought, creativity and problem solving. There's no need for them to have emotions or free will. That would still be AI.