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Comment by caddybox | Hacker News Reader

This is my personal opinion.

We have been devouring each other for ages now. Entire cultures have vanished, destroyed by more powerful members of the same species. The entire history of our species has been on violent conflict where a stronger group removes a weaker group, only to be removed later by another group that emerges stronger. Previously it was racial, clan-based violence. Now it's economic servitude where a perpetually unfortunate lower class keeps on greasing the wheels of industry with sweat and blood. The rich stay rich, the poor stay poor.

We are not benevolent or kind creatures. We are programmed to survive. As long as the poor live, they will rarely question the rationality behind the inequality that keeps them poor.

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No, you overlook the mutual aid factor. We are non-benevolent AND benevolent, unkind AND kind creatures. Hence the inability ever to settle on one explanation. Either direction you go, you're in error unless you account for both.

It becomes an existential crisis when humanity designs bots and AI and then behaves like humanity must COMPETE with the AI in order to survive, when we absolutely can't. We can't lift better than a forklift, run faster than a Veyron, we can't think better than Big Data. For the time being we're still able to dream better. For now.

Android dreams won't speak to us.

But there's no reason we can't pass on our capacity for mutual aid to the AI, as well as the competitiveness. And there's no reason the AI can't have heart and soul. When it fails it's because WE try to construct it in a false image of what we think we are.

This is probably too pessimistic. If it was true we would not be writing this right now, we'd be still in some semi-wild state, ripping each others hearts out as battle trophy to dedicate to some imaginary god. If predatory behavior really had the upper hand it would not allow the kind of social structures that solved difficulty technology problems and allowed mass health, mass education etc.

But destructive, rapacious, behavior feels just one step away even now that we are supposedly "civilized" and we have excruciating records of our bloody history.

If we don't find a way to bottle this instinct up we will not see many more decades.

Time is running out because the system is not time-invariant: we had explosive population and technology growth. The same regressive traits that might have "only" annihilated isolated cultures in the past will bring our collective demise.

Is it too pessimistic? Human history is filled with empires dominating their weaker neighbors, culling many of them (though not all), for the INgroup's self interest (it's also useful to keep subordinates around to do the menial labor). Even the less ruthless of these "imperialistic" entities such as the United States have a outstanding record. The native Americans can pay witness.

Not to mention what we do to animals. I read during just Superbowl Sunday 500 million chickens are slaughtered for the delight of eating chicken wings in the living room. If animals are nonconscious entities that don't suffer akin to robots then no harm no foul, but that is quintessential mass-scale devouring of another.

> The rich stay rich, the poor stay poor.

this has been false since at least the industrial revolution.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy?tab=chart

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/world-gdp-over-the-last-t...

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/world-population-in-extre...

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