RE: Is "Don't be Evil" enough or should we strive to be wise and good?
This is a great article!
Yes, 'do the right thing' is really prone to mis-use.
Putting gloss on conscription by saying it is an honor to partake in war for one's country, costing thousands of lives is only one of myriads of ways the people have been manipulated. So we actually have tyranny cloaking as a democracy...
I agree with your advocation of AI to spread wisdom among the crowd, but there is also a downside to AI in general from my perspective, because people are required more and more to emulate a machine's motion sequence. So we repeat certain patterns more and more and until they get deeply engrained in us. Doing so, some areas in our brain are more active than usual, others less. Repetitive motion sequences lead to comfort and non-thinking, questioning. Simply like a machine. Yet what becomes inactive is our creativity, willpower, power of questioning things.
Of course there are people who use AI or the internet to spread wisdom, which is a good thing, but many people are also distracted by other manipulative strategies applied through the internet which makes them stuck in the old paradigm of obedience..
That's my take on it at least, thanks a lot! :)
I'm more interested in gaining wisdom. I don't assume I know what is wise in order to spread wisdom in most cases. I do spread my opinions but my opinions are of no greater or lesser value than any other. True wisdom would have predictive qualities by which you can take a piece of data in a sequence and predict from that piece of data the possible new sequences. So for example the fastest way to solve a rubix cube requires wisdom, but any way to solve a rubix cube requires knowledge, while attempting to solve a rubix cube produces useful information.
I provide mostly information for people who are attempting to acquire wisdom. Once in a while I present current knowledge and discuss the result giving my opinion. Wisdom? That's rare for anyone to produce and it's always built up from previous knowledge. Because the world is so complex I do not think we can give more power to the crowd (decentralization of power) without augmenting the ability of the crowd to be wise.
This is the main point where I disagreed with Dan Larimer. I'm all for empowering the wise. I'm not for empowering ignorance. If we all strive to be the wise then we should be rewarded with greater empowerment. This means making a decision which can affect a million or a billion people is going to require as much wisdom as possible. This includes an awareness of the emotional states of large numbers of people in a manner which we can collect and scale it, this includes awareness of the world views, stakes, and other important factors which could show us how our decision impacts for example a million or a billion people.
That is a very dedicated comment. I love it!
" I do spread my opinions but my opinions are of no greater or lesser value than any other"
Exactly my stance. We are actually all just experiencing ourselves and what might be of great value to one might be of no value to others.
And I also agree with the empowerment of the wise instead of the ignorant. People want to have 'real' democracy, but in the current state of the world, where so many people have been conditioned into thinking that they are defined by their name, job or nationality, there needs to take place a profound inner shift within each at first that goes beyond superficialities and lets them decipher and discern where the ignorance stems from. So it starts with recognizing and acknowledging one's ignorance, which we only realize when we let go of our ego.