Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…I think they were really good, although they were out of conceptualization for a target. If I were to update them, and it’s a little bit like — to reveal my nerdishness — Giskard’s zeroth law. I think that what you really want in it is to parallel almost a Buddhist sense of the importance of life and sentience. That’s the kind of thing that you want if you’re creating really autonomous intelligences. I think the kind of Uncle Tom, if it really is a totally autonomous being — hence being careful about going into it — a new form of robot slaves is perhaps not ultimately where humanity would want to be. There’s not enough stress in them, I think, in what the robots are obliged to believe. A robot is free to believe something crazy and then act on it. That seems to me the biggest weakness of the law, at least what you see in the stories. Hence the alignment with human interests around, how do you amplify the quality and value of life, is, I think, a very good thing.…

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