Link to originalWe can put and end to darwinian evolution. An end to randomness, suffering and brutality.
Enable health for all but allow diversity for everything else. Adapt humanity to new climates, planets and bring an end to evolution as we know it.
– Transforming biomedical research through AI | Manolis Kellis | TEDxMIT
Link to originalWhen you, as a giant collective of cells, go spend a day boxing, you will come home and say “this was great – I achieved a bunch of social goals, I achieved some personal development goals, excellent”.
Nobody asked your cells and tissues whether they wanted to be killed by mechanical damage and then cleared out by the immune system in bruises. That is how collectives work. You gain capabilities at the collective level but no one may be watching for the welfare of the individual parts. We as humans, who have a huge degree of agency in the individual, may or may not want to adopt some of these policies. Certainly in the political arena that’s been tried a number of times in history, and it always works the same way – disaster. So, I think that we need to be looking for optimal policies for scaling collective intelligence, but not necessarily copying what biology does because I don’t think biology is tracking all of the values that we should hold sacred.
It’s a war against nature.
Link to originalAn alternative to military conscription
War against nature, not people.
In the-moral-equivalent-of-war, William James argues that we should conscript youth into hard civilian labor (mines, construction, fishing fleets) instead of military service. “Army enlisted against nature.” This way discipline and collective purpose are preserved “in the gradual advent of some sort of a socialistic equilibrium.”
All the qualities of a man acquire dignity when he knows that the service of the collectivity that owns him needs him.
…
In the more or less socialistic future towards which mankind seems drifting we must still subject ourselves collectively to those severities which answer to our real position upon this only partly hospitable globe. […] Martial virtues must be the enduring cement; intrepidity, contempt of softness, surrender of private interest, obedience to command, must still remain the rock upon which states are built—unless, indeed,we wish for dangerous reactions against commonwealths fit only for contempt, and liable to invite attack whenever a center of crystallization for military-minded enterprise gets formed anywhere in their neighborhood.
…
Why should men not some day feel that it is worth a blood-tax to belong to a collectivity superior in any ideal respect? Why should they not blush with indignant shame if the community that owns them is vile in any way whatsoever?
…
We should get toughness without callousness, authority with as little criminal cruelty as possible, and painful work done cheerily because the duty is temporary, and threatens not, as now, to degrade the whole remainder of one’s life.
…
Great indeed is fear; but it is not, as our military enthusiasts believe and try to make us believe, the only stimulus known for awakening the higher ranges of men’s spiritual energy.Universal labor obligation, fair distribution of socially necessary work, contribution to the collective …
Temporary rotation through the coal mines, then back to normal life (which under communism is increasingly “just” “leisure” 1).
He just doesn’t touch property relations or the free market, which makes this whole idea utopian.what role does discipline play in collective intelligence?
What work could look like as technology advances.
Everyone does periods2 of necessary work. Then you’re fully covered (house, health, education, food, …). Periods might be a few months in the year. Might be every few years… might be like conscription (e.g. after this necessary work doesn’t really exist anymore, but we do the conscription thingy for the social benefits – or maybe some “unpleasant” 3 jobs that humans have to do will never fully go away (care work).
The amount naturally shrinks as automation covers more.
Pair it with a revolution in our education system: learning and working should not be separate life phases