The Artilect Perspective of a Human Intelligence
It is not exaggerating to say that there is quite a close analogy between an artilect trying to communicate with a human being, and a human being trying to communicate with a rock.
To make another analogy, consider your feelings towards a mosquito as it lands on the skin of your forearm. When you swat it, do you stop to consider that the creature you just killed is a miracle of nano-technological engineering, that scientists of the 20th century had absolutely no way of building. The mosquito consists of billions of cells, each of which can be looked upon as a kind of molecular city, where a molecule in a cell is equivalent to a person in a city. The comparative scale of molecule to cell is about the same as person to city.
Despite the fact that the mosquitoes, which took billions of years to evolve, are extremely complex and miraculous creatures, we human beings don’t give a damn about them, and swat them because from our perspective they are a pest. We have similar attitudes towards killing ants when we walk on them during a stroll through the forest, or when flushing spiders down the plughole.
Who is to say that the artilects might not have similar attitudes towards human beings, and then wipe us out? With their gargantuan “artilectual” intelligence, it would be as easy as pie for them to do so.
The critical word in the artilect debate for the Terrans is “risk.” The Terrans will argue that humanity should never take the risk that the artilects, in an advanced form, might decide to wipe out the human species. The only certain way that the risk remains zero is that the artilects are never built in the first place. When push comes to shove, if the Terrans see that the Cosmists are truly serious about building artilects in an advanced state, then to preserve the survival of the human species, the Terrans will exterminate the Cosmists. Killing a few million Cosmists will be considered justifiable by the Terrans for the sake of preserving the survival of the whole human species, i.e. billions of people.
Such a sacrifice would be deemed reasonable by the Terrans. To make a historical analogy -- when Stalin’s troops were pushing west at the end of WWII, to capture Berlin and destroy Hitler’s Nazi regime that murdered 20 million Russians, they were losing about 100,000 Russian soldiers killed or injured for every major east European city captured from the Nazis. To Stalin, such a sacrifice was considered justifiable for the greater good of ridding the Russian people of the horror of mass murdering Nazism.
Notes:
Folksonomies: evolution intelligence speciesism
Taxonomies:
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/food and drink/desserts and baking (0.292666)
/law, govt and politics (0.234548)
Keywords:
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Entities:
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Concepts:
Human (0.959736): dbpedia | freebase | opencyc
Nazi Germany (0.863410): dbpedia | freebase | yago
Nazism (0.855888): dbpedia | freebase | opencyc
Mammal (0.768948): dbpedia | freebase | opencyc
Adolf Hitler (0.710803): dbpedia | freebase | opencyc | yago | musicBrainz
Species (0.665944): dbpedia | freebase | opencyc
Hominidae (0.661232): dbpedia | freebase