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Comment by AndrewKemendo | Hacker News Reader

We should be actively building this new "AI Species" because we are going to be extinct eventually and should think about making a better successor for the human species. The morality argument is nonsense.

How about this: "The primary objective of humanity should be to build an intelligent system with far more precise perception, reasoning and physical manipulation capabilities than humans"

That's my starting point.

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There are all sorts of ways to build intelligences. Humans are unique in that they are mammals (defined by having mothers). Mothers raise us with love, and teach us, for our helpless first years. We also have to act in communities. So there is a sense in that we are very lucky - in humans, our intelligence correlates with our altruism. In the grand space of possible minds, it is very unlikely that altruism and morality is correlated with intelligence. So whatever that machine race we birth is, it won't have any of the things we value if we're just building for "precise perception, reasoning, etc"

Tiny nitpick, but quite a lot of birds are nurturing despite not being mammals. You can find altruistic (or at least mutualist) behaviors in many other taxa.

None of that is unique to humans. Plenty of other primates and fowl have similar systems.

Even some seahorses or spiders, arguably (arguably because we have no idea what's happening in those brains)

> extinct eventually and should think about making a better successor for the human species

Citation needed. As it currently stands it seems incredibly unlikely we won't expand to most of our local group making extinction incredible unlikely.

You're suggesting that humanity in it's current form could survive the expansion of the sun and make it to the eventual heat death of the universe?

Whatever you'd like to accomplish, if destroying a city of millions with a nuclear bomb would give you pause, extinguishing humanity should give you more pause.

imho precision is a chimera which often leads to an excess of certitude; acceptance and awareness of uncertainty often leads to better decision-making.

Put another way, a laser pointer is not a very good tool with which to explore a cave, unless you can systematically measure it over the whole cave, an expensive and time-consuming process. If you're exploring a new cave, you might be better off with weak omnidirectional illumination like a lamp.

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