Will humanity ever outgrow war?

dex4974 · Jul 8, 2020

blarg said:
getting into dystopia if you are stopping crimes before they happen you might be able to stop violence some day but you would have to starve out splinter groups literally deny them resources until they died or reprogram those that just shun people who wont follow their community standards and you would have to hold them prisoner from going off on their own to establish their own society elsewhere or dominate places in the larger society

and theirs nothing to stop less benign people form developing ai in the 1st place

Reaching the utopian singularity would definitely be a process. For a while we would just have to work with the fact that some people are difficult or crazy. Given enough time it might be possible though.

dex4974 · Jul 8, 2020

blarg said:
im sure they could dominate but you overlooking that people may adopt some engineering and not all of it but you could also be breeding relatively small but self sustaining pockets of counter culture

unless your wiling to separate children or set up the ai as para-well over parents that all people must live under

I haven't worked out every kink yet but I think there might eventually be a way there that isn't draconian.

blarg · Jul 8, 2020

dex4974 said:
Reaching the utopian singularity would definitely be a process. For a while we would just have to work with the fact that some people are difficult or crazy. Given enough time it might be possible though.

not without violence and subjugation

dex4974 · Jul 8, 2020

blarg said:
not without violence and subjugation

Is there a better direction to go in?

blarg · Jul 8, 2020

dex4974 said:
I haven't worked out every kink yet but I think there might eventually be a way there that isn't draconian.

i think and hope non draconian governments with ai and enhanced humans could dominate and vastly limit the power and territory of violent and oppressive people even ones with their own ai and enhanced population but i dont think they can ever wipe those traits out entirely

blarg · Jul 8, 2020

dex4974 said:
Is there a better direction to go in?

expanding around the warlike and dominating putting pressure on them to change their ways without seizing absolute power over them/killing them

Slartibartfast · Jul 8, 2020

dex4974 said:
Could prosperity and technology make that possible? We still just barely understand how our own brains work. Maybe one day we will be the masters of our own evolution.

I would say that it will help, but we will continue to have sociopaths and other people without much empathy or strong drives to put themselves first. That can be fixed somewhat through therapy in cases where it is learned behaviour, but in cases where it is a physiological defect, would we need to figure out how to re-engineer the brain?

OrphanSlug · Jul 8, 2020

"I highly doubt humanity will outgrow war" for one reason, ideological disagreement.

Let these sink in a bit and we'll discuss them...

"When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence." - Jiddu Krishnamurti

"Religions, to a large extent, became divisive rather than unifying forces. Instead of bringing about an ending of violence and hatred through a realization of the fundamental oneness of all life, they brought more violence and hatred, more divisions between people as well as between different religions and even within the same religion. They became ideologies; belief systems people could identify with and so use them to enhance their false sense of self. Through them they could make themselves 'right' and others 'wrong' and thus define their identity through their enemies, the 'others', the 'nonbelievers' or 'wrong believers' who not infrequently they saw themselves justified in the killing.” - Eckhart Tolle

"Oddly, it is individualism that brings like-minded people together into some form of tribalism as a form of comfort, but history proven that inherently and intentionally separates us from others deemed outside that tribe, what has to be discarded for entry is empathy for others and it is replaced with any 'ism that generates pride in that tribalism, a long enough timeline the first calls are for marginalization of those outsiders for being in some way adversaries usually appealing to fear but with the ending point being justification for someone else's life coming to a violent end. You will never meet most of these people, never see their faces, never know how they experience life... but you will be told their deaths are important to your life, the 'ism will be the reason but ultimately we are still talking about one thing and one thing only, justification for loss of life even if they themselves did absolutely nothing violent to anyone else." - Me, an argument made in a more structured debate regarding sociology but within the confines of philosophy.

dex4974 · Jul 8, 2020

tacomancer said:
I would say that it will help, but we will continue to have sociopaths and other people without much empathy or strong drives to put themselves first. That can be fixed somewhat through therapy in cases where it is learned behaviour, but in cases where it is a physiological defect, would we need to figure out how to re-engineer the brain?

I wonder how advanced therapy techniques might become in the future. I have read some interesting stuff about using LSD to break barriers in therapy much more rapidly. I think it could definitely be possible to use technology to reverse things like psychopathy.

Slartibartfast · Jul 8, 2020

dex4974 said:
I wonder how advanced therapy techniques might become in the future. I have read some interesting stuff about using LSD to break barriers in therapy much more rapidly. I think it could definitely be possible to use technology to reverse things like psychopathy.

It is getting more advanced all the time as we continue to better understand the physiological mechanisms of the brain and move away from the old greek model of the mind being somewhat independent of the body:

EMDR Therapy (Eye Movement Desensitization & Reprocessing)

That right there is pretty much sci-fi brain hacking stuff, its really cool.

southwest88 · Jul 8, 2020

War - What is it good for?

dex4974 said:
What if the world is eventually governed by AI? Also is it possible for us to evolve and become wired differently? Is it possible that through the development of DNA technology we will be able to control our own evolution?

Stories & novels of AI controlling the known universe run throughout science fiction. Most of them don't end well - Why would an AI care about humanity? & higher order primates need a lot of resources - energy, temperature, humidity, weather control. Food (correct proportions), water, air, shelter, clothing, entertainment. & of course we'd want our food animals & pets - cattle, sheep, chickens, pigs, dogs, cats, goldfish ...

development of DNA technology, control our own evolution - That would take wisdom, & a very long-range view of the World. I don't think we're up to it, just yet. But yes, that's probably not going to stop people (nations, corporations) from tinkering with the technology. We'll just have to hope that they don't make any fatal mistakes in their experiments.

dex4974 · Jul 8, 2020