you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 32 points 4 months ago (5 children)

More precisely, it depends on the moral compass of five psychopaths.

  • source
  • hideshow 5 child comments
  • [+] [S] 3 points 4 months ago (4 children)
  • [–] 16 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    Yes, it does.

    (This is actually one of the topics I tend to beat to death, so...)

    It's not unique to AI or to any other industry or organization.

    Broadly, in the competition to climb the ladder of success in a hierarchical system, an individual must continually make choices.

    A person with honor, integrity and/or empathy will have some number of possible choices that they'll eliminate immediately, even if they're strategically superior, simply because their moral standards won't allow for them.

    People without any of those qualities, which is to say psychopaths and sociopaths, are not similarly constrained. They're wholly willing and able to choose the most personally beneficial course of action, entirely regardless of the harm it might do others.

    So all other things being more or less equal, psychopaths and sociopaths actually have a competitive advantage in hierarchical systems, so for all intents and purposes, hierarchical systems actually reward and effectively select for antisocial personality disorder.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 0 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 child)

    You're right, it is that way now. But it's not intrinsic to hierarchy, just to the current system.

    As a counterexample, not as an endorsement, consider feudalism (the old form, not technofeudalism). While psycho/sociopaths have an advantage reaching the top, there is a reasonable chance that their children will not be sick in the same way.

    Also Athenian Democracy, where people were randomly selected to form ruling council, judiciary, and assembly, so only as likely as the populace prevalence to be a psychopath. That system lasted for hundreds of years, including being taken over by (probably) sociopaths and returning afterwards to democracy.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

    Well - yes - I should maybe stipulate competitive hierarchy.

    Though I would tend to argue that hereditary hierarchy is relatively likely to go the same way, if for different reasons. The problem there isn't that sociopaths and psychopaths win, since there is no competition for them to win.. Instead the problem is that they're bred by drawing from a pool that's privileged and shielded from harsh realities and eventually entirely loses touch with the rest of humanity.

    If I had my way about it, we'd have Athenian democracy starting this very moment. Even with the very real threat of poor choices being made by random assortments of assholes, idiots and lunatics, it still could not possibly be worse than government by people eager to sell their influence and people eager to buy it.

  • source
  • parent
  • The incentive structure is how we behave as humans. Just about anyone would do anything for a million bucks, including working for a child rapist, so as long as that's true the incentive is for child rapists to make sure they have a lot of money to employ people so they won't get in trouble for raping children.

    Until people are willing to tell these pedophile billionaires to fuck off, it's going to keep getting worse.

  • source
  • parent
  • load more comments (-1 replies)