I notice that my ethics, my morality, my beliefs, differ in many ways from those of the past; I expect these things to differ in many ways from my own, in the future. I notice the relationship between these two concepts is reciprocal.
My grandfather talked to me, several times, about how he knew I had my own life, and that I wouldn’t always want to spend a lot of time with him; he was explicitly giving me permission, I think, to do something that he himself regretted in his youth, but understood better with age. He was telling me to live unfettered by that particular obligation. I didn’t see him much after I started working, and then he passed away.
If I have grandchildren some day, I know what I will tell them.
I consider the alternative grandfather who I didn’t have, who was jealous of my time and attention, and how it would have changed things.
What do we owe the future?
I think maybe we owe the future the freedom to choose for themselves, unfettered by the chains of our expectations. The freedom to choose means nothing if it does not include the freedom to make what we think are the wrong choices. The conservationist wanted to restrain the choices of the future, to limit them. And while I think the cuteness-maximizers are wrong, we owe them the right to be wrong, just as we act in so many ways our ancestors would have regarded as wrong.
The idea of a god-AI enshrining some particular group of people’s values forever doesn’t look very appealing to me; indeed, it looks like an abdication of our fundamental responsibility to the future.
What do I owe the past, therefore?
Gratitude, that I have more choices than they did.
I notice that my ethics, my morality, my beliefs, differ in many ways from those of the past; I expect these things to differ in many ways from my own, in the future. I notice the relationship between these two concepts is reciprocal.
My grandfather talked to me, several times, about how he knew I had my own life, and that I wouldn’t always want to spend a lot of time with him; he was explicitly giving me permission, I think, to do something that he himself regretted in his youth, but understood better with age. He was telling me to live unfettered by that particular obligation. I didn’t see him much after I started working, and then he passed away.
If I have grandchildren some day, I know what I will tell them.
I consider the alternative grandfather who I didn’t have, who was jealous of my time and attention, and how it would have changed things.
What do we owe the future?
I think maybe we owe the future the freedom to choose for themselves, unfettered by the chains of our expectations. The freedom to choose means nothing if it does not include the freedom to make what we think are the wrong choices. The conservationist wanted to restrain the choices of the future, to limit them. And while I think the cuteness-maximizers are wrong, we owe them the right to be wrong, just as we act in so many ways our ancestors would have regarded as wrong.
The idea of a god-AI enshrining some particular group of people’s values forever doesn’t look very appealing to me; indeed, it looks like an abdication of our fundamental responsibility to the future.
What do I owe the past, therefore?
Gratitude, that I have more choices than they did.