The Morality of Having Kids in a Magical, Maybe Simulated World
If you believe that the world’s problems are solved by people, then having children doesn’t seem like a waste of resources; it seems, in fact, like the most good you could do in the world.
Nadia Asparouhova • Cultivating Agency
We create a machine with intelligence and self-awareness and push it out into our imperfect world. Devised along generally rational lines, well disposed to others, such a mind soon finds itself in a hurricane of contradictions. We’ve lived with them and the list wearies us. Millions dying of diseases we know how to cure. Millions living in poverty ... See more
Ian McEwan • Machines Like Me: A Novel
The opposite of agency is learned helplessness. If people believe that we can’t do very much to stop the world’s problems, it’s unsurprising that they’d be terrified to bring children into the world. But this seems like a mental trap that we can, and should, teach people to resist falling into. As Clare Coffey writes in “Failure to Cop
... See moreNadia Asparouhova • Cultivating Agency
It is for this reason that the question of the post-human is worth exploring. Whether or not we can build a “spiritual robot” by 2100, in asking what is “post”-human, we must first ask what is human.
Along these lines, one recalls, too, Arendt’s warning in the prologue to The Human Condition: “The future man, whom the scientists tell us they will produce in no more than a hundred years, seems possessed by a rebellion against human existence as it has been given, a free gift from nowhere (secularly speaking), which he wishes to exchange, as it w... See more
theconvivialsociety.substack.com • The Paradox of Control
Moreover, whereas nuclear war and climate change threaten only the physical survival of humankind, disruptive technologies might change the very nature of humanity, and are therefore entangled with humans’ deepest ethical and religious beliefs. While everyone agrees that we should avoid nuclear war and ecological meltdown, people have widely differ
... See moreYuval Noah Harari • 21 Lessons for the 21st Century
Kind of cruel, in a way—but what do you expect from natural selection? Its job is to build machines that spread genes, and if that means programming some measure of illusion into the machines, then illusion there will be.