The prisoner’s dilemma is only one part of the human landscape, and no one has argued that it will prove the most decisive part. Well, Robert Wright comes close by having chosen to write an entire book on the iterated prisoner’s dilemma, but that book’s analysis of the causes of increasing human wealth completely neglects the wealth-increasing potential of an explosion of engineered intelligence.
I can make the counterargument that the more resources a person needs to fulfill his desires, the more likely the person is to impose harm on a fellow human being to acquire those resources and that for example I have little to fear from the proverbial Buddhist mystic who is perfectly happy to sit under a tree day after day while his body decays right in front of him. My simple counterargument implies that everything else being equal, I have more to fear from the one who desires cryonic suspension and revival than the one who does not.
But the more important point is that human trustworthiness is a very tricky subject. For example, your simple argument fails to explain why old people and others who know they are near the end of their lives are less likely to steal, defraud or cheat than young healthy people are.
I do not claim to know which of the groups under discussion is more trustworthy. (My only reason for advancing my counterargument was to reduce confidence in the insightfulness or your argument.) I am just passing along my tentative belief obtained from discussions with and reading of other singularitarians and cryonicists and obtained from observation of the evolution of my own beliefs about human trustworthiness that people tend to think they know. They think it is the same group they belong to.
The prisoner’s dilemma is only one part of the human landscape, and no one has argued that it will prove the most decisive part. Well, Robert Wright comes close by having chosen to write an entire book on the iterated prisoner’s dilemma, but that book’s analysis of the causes of increasing human wealth completely neglects the wealth-increasing potential of an explosion of engineered intelligence.
I can make the counterargument that the more resources a person needs to fulfill his desires, the more likely the person is to impose harm on a fellow human being to acquire those resources and that for example I have little to fear from the proverbial Buddhist mystic who is perfectly happy to sit under a tree day after day while his body decays right in front of him. My simple counterargument implies that everything else being equal, I have more to fear from the one who desires cryonic suspension and revival than the one who does not.
But the more important point is that human trustworthiness is a very tricky subject. For example, your simple argument fails to explain why old people and others who know they are near the end of their lives are less likely to steal, defraud or cheat than young healthy people are.
I do not claim to know which of the groups under discussion is more trustworthy. (My only reason for advancing my counterargument was to reduce confidence in the insightfulness or your argument.) I am just passing along my tentative belief obtained from discussions with and reading of other singularitarians and cryonicists and obtained from observation of the evolution of my own beliefs about human trustworthiness that people tend to think they know. They think it is the same group they belong to.