The ultimate test of a civilization’s ethics and morality is to program them into a recursively self-improving AI seed, fire it up, and still exist a year later.
We strongly recommend not attempting to pass it.
There are those, in the field of biotechnological and medical ethics, who class anagathics as dangerous and addictive, inasmuch as ceasing to take your life-extension drugs results in a plethora of aging-related side-effects, followed by death. The absurdity of this position and the farcical nature of its enforcement naturally ensure
Not an actual trope-a-day, but something I thought I’d write down after the latest xkcd reminded me of the existence of the book, The Giving Tree. Just in case I forgot it by the time I’m actually tackling Values Dissonance, belike. Which in our culture may well be
“Yes,” said the forensic eschatologist. “Your crippling techniques all appear fully operational. Your screening talkers have detected no basilisks or dangerous memetic payloads, and neither have the people screening them. Your emergency-wipe protocols show no sign of tampering, your network links show no anomalous traffic, and there is no present
First, the note, which is regarding Fan. As I commented over on G+: So, the worst part is, I wrote this partly because it seemed like a good application of the words, and partly because it was an idea stuck in my brain that needed to be written down so
Thinking briefly of things other than today’s challenge, I’d like to draw the attention of interested readers to the My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic fanfic Friendship is Optimal. (Trope page here; story here.) Specifically, with relevance to the Eldraeverse where seed AIs are concerned. Namely, inasmuch as
Holy Is Not Safe: Anything made, shaped, or Vorlon-touched by a weakly godlike superintelligence may be holy, but is also very likely to be powerful enough to be catastrophically dangerous if misused, mishandled, or otherwise generally mucked about with. (Especially things like, say, the Eye of Elmiríën, which is to