Dubious. Murder rates were very high in those recorded cultures that most closely resemble the generally accepted model of Mesolithic life - Inuit and Eskimo, New Guinea, Tasmanian, etc. That pattern is somewhat mysterious, and therefore not reliable - and there are counterexamples: England circa 1800, when the rich outbred the poor in the context of the Industrial Revolution. Has prosperity reduced family size among the Saudis?
Only in the cities, where they are also more likely to be monogamous; however, they are also more exposed to Western ideas of society there, so its hard to reach a conclusion.
I think a lot of that has to do with a feeling of self-reliance. We progressively feel less need for other people as things advance. Granted, it's a false feeling of self-reliance BUT it still seems very real. We can go to the store to buy food, clothing, etc. - it's all available without an apparent need of those who actually produce the goods. They are pretty much invisible to the general public. So, with a lessened (apparent) need for other people, consideration etc. for others will naturally decline over time.
Too many people. And worse, too many people that are far removed from ourselves. In the old days, one knew the farmer who grew the vegatables and the rancher who raised the beef ...even if only by name. There was a connection between people. That's not only not true today, but it's made even worse by those same producers being large corporations, not "people". But think about it this way .... if you're really willing to be alturistic, helpful, compassionately caring, how can you do it? And for whom? You can't help all of the people, so who do you help? And even if you do help some people, in a short time, they'll move away to some other place anyway. In modern society, most people have little or no real connection to others. And even if there is a connection, it's usually broken by moves or promotions, etc. So why should we start caring about people who won't even be there in two or three years? Baron Max
I would SO be an evil scientist if I had the time. Not because I'm committed to good or evil per se, but just because I think people should live to their maximum potential and there's a lot of open positions on that side of the table.
Because you don't do it for a pay off for yourself. That's selfish. You do it to help them. You help the ones you can, when you can. The ones you can't help, you find someone who can help them. Its like an office. How many people like working with the person that says "It's not my job"? No, we want to work with the person who says "Here let me help you" or "Let me find someone who can help you with that" We are all humanity's Customer Service Dept and some people want to pretend they don't speak the language. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Of course we can kill ourselves without any help from AI. But you are confusing the issue. The reason an AI might decide to wipe us out is that it is a nonhuman intellegence. It's the nonhuman part that is key. There is little reason to think that a nonhuman intellegence would have our best interests at heart. So, as many others have said, an intellegent person is no more likely to have goals inimical to human survival than a dumb one. But,being human, he is far less likely to want to destroy humanity than a sentient computer program.
That's part of the reason we need to get into space. One way or the other, if we stay on earth, we're doomed. We need to spread out. Colonize the planets, the asteroid belt, the stars. Think how much money Haliburton could make by asteroid mining! Maybe that's why Rove resigned, so he could get started on taking Haliburton interplanetary. What with all the Iraq war profits, they should be able to afford the investment!
I doubt it. They are just looking out for themselves. Smart of them to move out before the dollar falls actually, they are obviously pretty sharp, I wouldn't be surprised if all their capital is invested outside the US.
It's because the application of our pack-social instinct to cover an increasingly larger "pack" is a reasoned and learned behavior. Ever since the first cities were built and people had to learn to live in harmony and cooperation with total strangers, we have had to rely on our uniquely massive forebrains to do battle with our primitive midbrains where all the instincts are processed. Visit a city of five to ten thousand people and you'll find that for the most part they get along very well. They don't lock their doors, they keep track of and discipline each other's children, they help each other out during hard times without waiting for government assistance. This is an increase of three orders of magnitude over the size of a Mesolithic human "pack." That is a phenomenal triumph of reason over instinct. The problem with the "more advanced" societies like the United States is that we are the most attractive to immigrants. Human beings still vote with their feet and want to live in the civilization that appears to be the most prosperous. Americans are constantly under pressure to expand our pack-social instinct to include increasingly stranger "strangers." When the incoming settlers were more of the British, French, Dutch and Germans who were already here, they were just more of the same. As soon as Irishmen, Italians and Slavic people started coming, there was ethnic friction. These people (my people actually, they were Slavic) were not from our "pack." But they were white Christians and after a couple of generations of learning to speak English (the Irish had a head start on that) and play baseball they became indistinguishable from our pack-mates. The new immigrants have a harder time. Many of them have different color skin, some of them are not Christians, most bring cultural motifs that are significantly different from our Western European model. These folks are really not from our "pack". It took us thousands of years to expand our pack-social instinct from a Mesolithic family of nomads to a city of 10,000. We've even had some success at applying it to an entire nation. We won't necessarily share our food or let them walk over our lawn and pick the flowers on the way to school, but we do treat them with civility and even cordiality and we always pitch in to help when there's a disaster. The problem is that we're now being asked to expand that instinct beyond the nation to another level: a region, or even the entire planet. For the goddess's sake, Sam, a whole lot of us are already doing that! With my aptitude for foreign languages and my Southern California acquaintance with foreign cultures, I go out of my way to help the immigrants I encounter, even the unpopular and illegal ones. Many of us are trying to help the people on the other side of the planet make better lives for themselves, through charity, political activism, and pompous nagging on SciForums. And those are not only complete strangers, they are nothing but abstractions to us! We've got the tolerance and we're spreading it patiently. Yes, the majority of the human race has not reached this point. That is why we still have nations instead of one planet-wide civilization. But the fact that so many ordinary citizens have reached a point that only philosophers and the occasional prophet could achieve a few centuries ago is testimony to the power of civilization--the triumph of the forebrain over the midbrain--to eventually bring it to the entire species. Don't weep because so many people are intolerant. It is their nature, there is still a caveman in their soul. Rejoice because so many people have transcended their nature and taught the caveman--and the caveman's children--to be tolerant. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
That is a good way to look at it. But I did not mean in terms of "other people"; I meant in terms of the same people: family, friends, colleagues. Why are we less inclined to be sociable, or invest less of ourselves in others these days?
Hmm. It couldn't be because some of us think we'd get our heads hacked off if we did, is it? That might be true in some places I suppose.
The western culture is one of "I" and "me", it's become a selfish culture, Sam. We see it in the movies, on tv, in the media, in the news papers, etc. Being sociable and/or being helpful to others is not "I" or "me" in most cases. But don't forget, western culture is also highly mobile. The person you care about today will probably be gone tomorrow. So why should you try to get close to them? Baron Max
But seeing only the good without seeing and recognizing the bad is nothing but an ignorant, narrow, biased point of view. Optimizism without a healthy dash of pessimism is as useless as the opposite viewpoint. Rose colored glasses, huh, Fraggle? Baron Max
We have no real standard of comparison, do we? None of us were alive 200 years back, and we rely on literature and records that are quite open to selective interpretation. But I think you are definitely wrong on the last part, if only because we no longer burn homosexuals and witches.
Oh, I think we can believe it to a pretty good degree, don't you think? Unless you think everyone back then wrote only fiction! The only reason that we don't burn homosexuals and witches these days is because of laws and the possible consequences .....not because we're so damned tolerant and understanding!! Baron Max
I could be a prick and point out that the idea of history and fiction being separate is a relatively modern (500ish years) idea. But I was more referring to the tendency to pick and choose between sources. 200 years ago we saw a hell of a lot less people. That's got to be a factor - people are a lot more welcome when you only see them once in a while. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! The fact that those laws exist points to a more tolerant society.
No, it points to a society that wants to force others to do what THEY want, and not what others might want. Ain't no society that I know that's built on a true majority rule. If we were, then we'd probably be still be whacking gays in the city parks and the bars! Baron Max
