Comment by Nevermark | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Nevermark | Hacker News Reader

The industrial revolution was a mini-quake compared to automated cognition. But we can learn some things from it.

I see the industrial revolution as the invention of the cart. It made horses more productive. Then the car replaced horses.

It is taking people longer to wrap their heads around the reality than I thought it would. If there was a competitive human species on the planet getting smarter by the day, people would get it.

It is hard to maintain awareness of something which presents questions with no obvious answers. The one answer I have, is we need to clean up the ethics in our systems. Ethics are not costs against value, they are the full accounting and optimization of all value.

More intelligent creatures than us, not held back by our our outdated biologically instincts, won't have any trouble with that game theory.

So ethical systems are not just a shield for us as individuals, but also of inherent value to new forms of self-interest.

But that won't help us, if we don't push to align and strengthen our own systems now. And reverse the concentration of power in corrupt individuals who demonstrate every day that they are not interested in the wellbeing of humans in general.

This is urgent. We do not have a lot of time to effect this change.

The ones that can change it won’t because they benefit from the system being how it is. Being a politician is a gateway to money and power.

The fundamental flaw of the constitution is that it had no ethics built in, it’s up to the voters to pick better, our press to report truthfully without bias and those have failed as well.

> The fundamental flaw of the constitution is that it had no ethics built in

Yes, that would have been a really good intent to make explicit, to guide the courts.

I think of that when the Supreme Court or a state court rules process is more important than a convicts demonstrable (with new evidence that has come to light) innocence. Really horrific given that one out of eight death row inmates are exonerated. That level of bad convictions being overturned despite all the difficulties doing that, strongly suggests that a great many innocent people are still executed.

Another thing I wish the constitution did: Explicitly and universally enshrine decentralization. Not just the implicit decentralization of checks and balances only within the government.

I.e. party seat limits, independent federal and state parties, etc. For any kind of political group or coordination.

Where enough decentralization is enforced, a stable majority interest is maintained (even as who is the majority may change) for no minority to be able to break those requirements.

But where centralization is allowed, it is an eternal fight to hold it back.

Of course the founding fathers didn’t have time to do that or address slavery either

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