Today I received a comment on a remark I left on You Tube about power being our fundamental value. The comment was that I was incredibly myopically confusing power with competence, and grossly over-simplifying the adaptive design of the human psyche as produced by natural selection. I wrote this:
Thanks for your kind and civil, constructive response. But I disagree with your critique. Competence is a broad component of an organism’s ability to solve diverse reproductive problems. Relatively speaking, the less competent individual lacks access to resources and security; they have low power as I am using the term. I agree that in the right socioecological circumstances, ones we would hope for in our human societies, prestige-based leadership can thrive in comparison to brutish leadership based on mere physical prowess or having achieved a monopoly on violence. But competence and prestige, all the other “good” attributes an individual may consciously and sincerely strive for, lead to power, and that is why our body/minds have evolved to strive for them. Again, power to maximize lifetime inclusive fitness, perhaps through strategies of cooperation (i.e., coopetition, cooperating to compete better, perhaps more competently). So I stand by my point, we are too enamored, ultimately, with power, to be competent enough to pursue general self-improving AI. One indication of it is that we choose to go for such general X-risk AI instead of limiting ourselves to developing fantastic domain-specific expert systems that can enable us to solve particular important problems, an example of which I think would be AlphaFold. Such systems would not be God like and would be nonconscious and unable to make plans to change the world in ways way out of alignment with diverse human secondary values. But no, we are so attracted to God-like power that we rush forward to create it, unleash it, consciously or unconsciously hoping, yearning, that the power will transfer to us or our in-group, at least long enough for us to reap the high inclusive fitness benefits of successfully executing a high risk / high reward strategy. Anyway, in brief, competence is a cross-culturally laudable way toward gaining and maintaining power, as long as the more powerful people in your society don’t decide to block you for fear of losing a bit of their own power.
Today I received a comment on a remark I left on You Tube about power being our fundamental value. The comment was that I was incredibly myopically confusing power with competence, and grossly over-simplifying the adaptive design of the human psyche as produced by natural selection. I wrote this:
Thanks for your kind and civil, constructive response. But I disagree with your critique. Competence is a broad component of an organism’s ability to solve diverse reproductive problems. Relatively speaking, the less competent individual lacks access to resources and security; they have low power as I am using the term. I agree that in the right socioecological circumstances, ones we would hope for in our human societies, prestige-based leadership can thrive in comparison to brutish leadership based on mere physical prowess or having achieved a monopoly on violence. But competence and prestige, all the other “good” attributes an individual may consciously and sincerely strive for, lead to power, and that is why our body/minds have evolved to strive for them. Again, power to maximize lifetime inclusive fitness, perhaps through strategies of cooperation (i.e., coopetition, cooperating to compete better, perhaps more competently). So I stand by my point, we are too enamored, ultimately, with power, to be competent enough to pursue general self-improving AI. One indication of it is that we choose to go for such general X-risk AI instead of limiting ourselves to developing fantastic domain-specific expert systems that can enable us to solve particular important problems, an example of which I think would be AlphaFold. Such systems would not be God like and would be nonconscious and unable to make plans to change the world in ways way out of alignment with diverse human secondary values. But no, we are so attracted to God-like power that we rush forward to create it, unleash it, consciously or unconsciously hoping, yearning, that the power will transfer to us or our in-group, at least long enough for us to reap the high inclusive fitness benefits of successfully executing a high risk / high reward strategy. Anyway, in brief, competence is a cross-culturally laudable way toward gaining and maintaining power, as long as the more powerful people in your society don’t decide to block you for fear of losing a bit of their own power.