Is "Don't be Evil" enough or should we strive to be wise and good?
Don't be Evil is not good enough and Do the Right Thing is limited to those who can discover the Right Thing
Google had the corporate code of conduct "Don't be Evil". Recently Google changed this to "Do the Right Thing". The difficulty is in determining what the "Right Thing" is. In my opinion there is no objective "Right Thing" which everyone will agree upon. Instead we reach a pseudo consensus from the bottom up or from the top down. If it's from the top down then it's thought leaders telling people how to think and what is the right thing in a very hierarchical manner. We can see the peak of this with the church and divine command where all authority comes from God which determines what the religious institutions can dictate as the "Right Thing" in the opinion and mind of God. In the bottom up mechanism it is the crowd which by way of public sentiment emerges a pseudo-consensus on what is the "Right Thing" for that period of time in the mind of the crowd.
In today's world we have either the government which can from a top down manner tell people through propaganda and other means how they should feel. This puts the government in the position of God as the divine authority to determine the "Right Thing" for society. This is a heavily centralized and hierarchical model often populated by "experts" at the top who are advisors to people in high authority in the government who shape the opinions and morals of these influential people in order to have these opinions rub off on the rest of society. In this case it is almost like a nobility class influenced by a priest class to promote certain narratives which encourage or discourage certain moral beliefs.
In the crowd based manner in determining the good we have more of a decentralized level where it's possibly a democracy with votes, or it's based on opinion polls, or public sentiment data from the demographics whether it be the sponsors of a Youtuber, or the advertiser class in Google. So when Google for example banned ads for ICOs this is in a way a unique break from Google always following the will of the advertisers. The reasoning for why Google made this decision in my opinion was not properly or thoroughly explained either to Google shareholders or to the users of Google. Since this decision has a cost to shareholders who may not be able to get as much revenue out of Google is it the case that Google made this decision out of a moral concern that ICOs are evil?
In the crowd based manner of determining the good there are some major problems. The main problem which I have identified is the crowd makes decisions typically out of ignorance. The saying "wisdom of the crowd" is often not true and often it's the ignorance of the crowd which leads to disasters. The solution which I have identified for this problem is to augment the wisdom of the crowd by using AI to allow each and every member of the crowd to have the opportunity to reduce their ignorance. In the current society ignorance is involuntary and the ability to reduce it is restricted to those who can either afford to continuously educate themselves both in terms of time and money, and who have access to massive super computers (centralized) to run simulations, tests, and in a sense augment beyond the natural limited capacity of the human brain).
The motivation for my promotion of a decentralized exocortex functionality is specifically to address this problem. The ability of each of us to be good is limited by our ability to:
- Ability to process all the information (big data) and analyze it if we are going with the crowd based sentiment measure of what is good.
- Access to experts, advisers, the thought leaders, who can tell us what the government or God has decided we should believe is good.
In the United States in particular this access to the top down mechanism of determining the good is limited to certain people. If you're a government official then you probably do have advisers. If you're a CEO you may be able to afford to hire advisers, hire spiritual gurus, hire tribal elders, who can tell you how to navigate all the sensitive issues that your company has to deal with when making decisions. Access to bottom up mechanisms such as the crowd is also limited because if you're not working at Facebook, or some similar company, you may not know what a billion people think about anything in particular due to not having access to the data sets and also even if you had access you probably don't have the tools to process big data.
So in the end in order for a less evil and more good world we have to strive to produce as much wisdom as we can and most importantly distribute that wisdom to as many in the crowd as possible. If the crowd is to have any decision authority at all then the crowd has to be at least as wise as the government, the corporation, or the top down expert based entities which currently make these decisions. If the crowd cannot scale it's wisdom then the ignorance of the crowd will likely produce the evil we fear.
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.
Society has the responsibility and duty to demand the training that society itself requires for its development.
And everything begins by understanding that we are all important and have a role to play in society is a principle that must be taught from our home. Only by forming participatory and critical citizens will we be able to form a society that works shoulder to shoulder for the constant development of a country, for example.
This is what some governments worldwide do not understand.
Greetings and as always contributing topics of global discussion.
Thank you @dana-edwards I really enjoyed reading your view on this topic. Generally speaking, the terms "good and evil" are always relative in meaning to every human. Even when the government decides "evil-things" in my individual view that doesn't mean that I have to adapt or confirm the view of the government. There is no way that the government or corportations will ever gather "enough" big data to foresee the future outcomes of situations or to define what is good and evil.
That is a beautiful article, which perfectly explains why we need more decentralization. In centralized systems, like you said, few individuals and monopolies have all the power, and they can treat people like slaves (wage slavery is like slavery IMO). Moreover, like you said, they also have access to most of the data. Now on STEEM for example, everything is public, and one could well write his/her own analytics tool. Decentralization is basically freedom, while centralization is slavery!
money will forever centralize.. today, 70% of bitcoin is in the hands of the same usual suspects
people will forever collude as long as money exists, servitude is embedded in economics. I blog a lot about it
The point is that decentralization would create more self employment oppurtinities. We saw that Linux was created by open source developers, and which is now as good as Windows. Similarly, most of the services provided by the likes of Amazon, Microsoft and Google can be replaced by decentralized versions.
We do need more decentralization but in my opinion we need to do it in a smart way. It's not a good idea to create a democracy run on ignorance and disinformation. This in my opinion could end up producing results worse than just leaving the experts in charge. In essence we have to scale the decision making capability of any member we empower.
So what I'm saying is, do not empower me to be responsible to make decisions for a million people without giving me access to the means to acquire wisdom from which to make heavier decisions. I don't want my decisions to have a lot of weight if I cannot even know how my decisions may impact myself, the people around me, or the millions of people I know little to nothing about.
Yet that is what we see with DPOS, with Democracy in general. In DPOS this isn't a big problem yet because it's mostly the same kind of people and not even a million users. This becomes a big problem when we have 10 million+ users of all different cultures and world views. When it gets to 100 million people then you cannot have Ned making a decision by himself which can impact 100 million people unless Ned has the same sort of advisers a President of a country has.
The purpose of the U.S. government is to "Dumb down" its' people so, masses can be controlled by the government and the mass media.
Agree, we the people have to seek wisdom, truth and freedom. Thus, I am the Truth seeker and Freedom.
That would imply the government only exists to consume and conserve power for it's own sake.
You said it exactly how government is.
Very well-said, @dana-edwards. I hope people will heed your words. thanks!
well objective truth can only be obtained by taking responsibility for what IS and means "respect all life"... all that happens in the world, 24/7. Self responsibility is a natural law. Going to work, watching football and reading celebrity gossips while turning a blind eye to one's government waging war (legalized crime) and earth being destroyed by techno-corporatism (see my latest blogs exposing the assault on humans and nature) is not objective...
I encourage everybody to wake up and fast, there is no abundance in the AI scenario but a cyber prison governed by the internet of things waiting for us around the corner
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"don't be evil" is pretty terrible because the universe does not hear negations, the universe just hears "be evil"
Perhaps Do the Right Thing was their favorite Spike Lee Movie.