hedges

We still have the power – we don't have to turn it over to the robots now or ever.

In theory, but can we control ourselves? There are a lot of financial incentives in developing better machines and algorithms. We couldn't stop nuclear weapons or global warming, and AI is a lot more attractive and powerful than either of those to business and governments. Not to mention that nuclear weapons and global warming are harmful in a very easily understood way, whereas AI might be harmful in very strange ways. It's like a pack of wolves left alone with a poisonous steak. It's a delicious steak and the poison is somewhat beyond their understanding; some wolves even think there's no poison at all. Isolating the poison from the steak is as difficult for the wolves as making safe AI is for us.

You can imagine how incredibly valuable an AI capable of doing a programmer's work would be. It's a technology far off, but not implausible.

But as soon as we reach that point, it seems unlikely that things won't spiral out of control. Imagine a thousand highly intelligent programmers who are capable of research, think fluently in statistics, and cooperate perfectly. Additionally, these programmers can examine and modify how their own brains work, and boost their performance, remove their errors. With the press of a button, they can also create more copies of themselves.

Everything might spiral out of control.

How do you make sure things don't spiral out of control?

As long as a more equal distribution of wealth would reduce suffering, we can certainly consider wealth inequality harmful.

One would have to have rather alien values to think that luxuries for a few are preferable to food and health for all.

If I was a guy, they'd be happy to talk business and learn about my startup.

That's unlikely. If you were a guy they wouldn't be talking to you at all. Even less likely they'd do so with genuine interest. That is the experience most males have in such conferences. Few men get any kind of attention from anyone without putting in a lot of effort.

Having men lose interest in you after your fiancée is mentioned doesn't tell you anything about the likelihood of them seeing you only as a sexual object. Could just as well be a human object they want to love.

It was absolutely unusable. Here in the north you would get two hours of sunlight during the winter, and f.lux would work accordingly.

Similarly in the summer, you would get only a few hours of darkness, making f.lux almost completely useless except for a few months of the year.

While pursuing his entrepreneurial dream, he walked around asking women for their used sanitary pads (while most men struggle to ask for a date), almost gets tied to a tree when a witch doctor incites the local villagers against him, has his wife leave him (only to come back after his success), and even his mother abandoned him; still he goes on.

And then, even after having practically everyone around him ostracize and abandon him, he doesn't go for the money, but remains humble and does the best he can to make the world a better place.

Identity has few benefits compared to the increased safety and honesty that anonymity affords.