Tom McCabe wrote:
--- Eugen Leitl <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On Tue, Jun 05, 2007 at 01:24:04PM -0700, Tom McCabe
wrote:
Unless, of course, that human turns out to be evil
and
That why you need to screen them, and build a group
with
checks and balances.
If our psychology is so advanced that we're willing to
trust the fate of the world with it, why have we had
no success at getting prisoners to avoid committing
further crimes, even when we have them under 24/7
control and observation for years on end? Keep in mind
that Hitler, Stalin, and the like, at age 20, would
have seemed like normal, regular guys.
FWIW, I seem to remember that Stalin at age 20 was a political terrorist
and a bank robber.
OTOH, my real problem with "...a group with checks and balances." is who
gets to specify those self-same checks and balances. E.g., I can't
think of a single government official or leader I would trust that is in
any position of power. (Well, perhaps one, but her "position of power"
is rather scant in the amount of power.)
...
Obviously there is some selection effect (people who
are nasty jerks tend to want power more than others),
but it's not so severe that an insignificant part of
the population falls under the category of "potential
evil overlord".
eh? You must not be following the same news that I follow.
...
A computer system that we can design to spec, test to
an arbitrary degree of precision in a sandbox computer
environment, and for which the mathematics of behavior
are tractable.
This strikes me as...unlikely. Great, if you can manage it, but just a
bit unlikely. (Not the design to spec part. That's doable. But both
the specs themselves and the "mathematics of behavior are tractable."
seem more than a bit dubious
-----
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