It is surprising and somewhat disappointing that movements aiming at the prevention of nuclear war are regarded throughout the West as Left-Wing movements or as inspired by some -ism which is repugnant to a majority of ordinary people. It is not in this way that opposition to nuclear warfare should be conceived. It should be conceived rather on the analogy of sanitary measures against epidemic.
Bertrand Russell, Common Sense and Nuclear Warfare, London, 1959, introduction
Clearly, Eliezer should seriously consider devoting himself more to writing fiction. But it is not clear to me how this helps us overcome biases any more than any fictional moral dilemma. Since people are inconsistent but reluctant to admit that fact, their moral beliefs can be influenced by which moral dilemmas they consider in what order, especially when written by a good writer. I expect Eliezer chose his dilemmas in order to move readers toward his preferred moral beliefs, but why should I expect those are better moral beliefs than those of all the other authors of fictional moral dilemmas? If I’m going to read a literature that might influence my moral beliefs, I’d rather read professional philosophers and other academics making more explicit arguments. In general, I better trust explicit academic argument over implicit fictional “argument.”
Robin Hanson, comment to Eliezer Yudkowsky, Epilogue: Atonement, LessWrong, February 6, 2009
The threshold between a machine which was the intellectual inferior or superior of a man would probably be reached if the machine could do its own programming.
I. J. Good, Review of D. R. Hartree, Calculating Instruments and Machines, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series A (General), vol. 114, no. 1 (1951), p. 107
Once a machine is designed that is good enough, […] it can be put to work designing an even better machine. At this point an “explosion” will clearly occur; all the problems of science and technology will be handed over to machines and it will no longer be necessary for people to work. Whether this will lead to a Utopia or to the extermination of the human race will depend on how the problem is handled by the machines. The important thing will be to give them the aim of serving human beings.
I. J. Good, “Speculations on Perceptrons and Other Automata”, IBM Research Lecture, RC-115 (1959), p. 17
The evidence is clear and overwhelming that both the detection of deception and often its propagation have been major forces favoring the evolution of intelligence. It is perhaps ironic that dishonesty has often been the file against which intellectual tool for truth have been sharpened.
Robert Trivers, The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life, New York, 2011, p. 5
Throughout human history, you see that the worst problems for people almost always come from other people[.]
Dario Maestripieri, quoted in Natalie Angier, ‘Political Animals (Yes, Animals)’, The New York Times, January 22, 2008