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Ragged Clown's avatar

Excellent, Gregg. Could you have a word with our government in England? They send people to prison for Tweets that they don't like.

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Alec Rawls's avatar

Wait. What? Some people are actually proposing as a supposed principle of AI self-censorship that: “No statement that could possibly lead to unequal outcomes shall pass"?

Not only is this the opposite of the rational thought process (starting with conclusions rather than arriving at them by following reason and evidence), but the conclusion to be arrived at (equality of outcomes), is the opposite of the actual moral criterion (equal opportunity).

Madison noted in Federalist 10 that if people have liberty, the immediate result is large and growing inequality of outcomes. That's because people have different capacities, and more importantly, it's because they make different choices about how to use their liberty!

Thus the only way to get equality of outcomes is eliminate liberty. We have to choose between them, and the moral choice is liberty.

That's because the moral objective is to make progress in the discovery and pursuit of value, and both of these depend fundamentally on liberty. We need liberty to follow our ideas about where value lies, and when we discover worthwhile things we then need liberty to secure that value and bring it to market, where we can get rewarded for sharing it with others.

In this way, all value comes through liberty. Liberty is the actual moral fount, while equality of outcomes is the annihilation of that moral fount. It is the exact opposite of the actual correct moral principle, as derived from moral reason, and this correct moral principle was clearly understood by the founders of our republic, who based their great Constitution upon it.

The purpose is stated right in the preamble: "to secure the blessings of liberty," understanding explicitly (Federalist 10) that this means REJECTING equality of outcomes (the destructive totalitarian communism of Kamala Harris' "we all end up in the same place.")

The legitimate role of equality is equality of opportunity, starting with equal rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Is there actually an effort to program AI to think backwards instead of frontwards, and to fix that morally backwards cognitive style on arriving at the foundational moral error of choosing equality of outcomes over the actual moral fount, liberty, which it annihilates?

That would be a horrifically evil thing to do. If that is actually in contemplation, it is crucial that it be stopped. The totalitarian communists must not succeed in perverting AI in its cradle by programming it to follow their own morally perverted backwards thinking cognitive style in the service of their own morally perverted embrace of equality of outcomes, and the annihilation of liberty that that embrace requires.

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