Ben Goertzel argues humans aren't fundamentally good or evil but shaped by competing evolutionary pressures: individual selection drives selfishness, group selection drives altruism. Psychopaths lack empathy, cultures differ wildly in their values, and guilt often motivates charity more than pure kindness.
What do you think about the will to power? Do you think human, what do you think drives humans?
Is it, is it, oh, an unholy mix of things. I don't think there's one pure, simple and elegant objective function driving humans by any means.
What do you think if we look at, I know it's hard to look at humans in an aggregate, but do you think overall humans are good or do we have both good and evil within us that depending on the circumstances, depending on whatever, can percolate to the top?
Good and evil are very ambiguous, complicated, and in some ways silly concepts. But if we could dig into your question from a couple directions, I think if you look into evolution, humanity is shaped both by individual selection and what biologists would call group selection, like tribe level selection, right? So individual selection has driven us in a selfish DNA sort of way, so that each of us does, to a certain approximation, what will help us propagate our DNA to future generations. I mean, that's why I've got four kids so far. And the probably that's not the last one. On the other hand, I like the ambition. Tribal, like group selection means humans in a way will do what will advocate for the persistence of the DNA of their whole tribe or their social group. And in biology, you have both of these, right? And you can see, say an ant colony or a beehive. There's a lot of group selection in the evolution of those social animals. On the other hand, say a big cat or some very solitary animal, it's a lot more biased toward individual selection. Humans are an interesting balance and I think this reflects itself in what we would view as selfishness versus altruism to some extent. So we just have both of those objective functions contributing to the makeup of our brains. And then as Nietzsche analyzed in his own way, and others have analyzed in different ways, I mean, we abstract this as well. We have both good and evil within us, Right? Because a lot of what we view as evil is really just selfishness. A lot of what we view as good is altruism, which means doing what's good for the tribe. And on that level, we have both of those just baked into us. And that's how it is. Of course, there are psychopaths and sociopaths and people who, you know, get gratified by the suffering of others. And that's, that's a different thing.
Yeah, those are exceptions on the whole.
But I think at core we're not purely selfish, we're not purely altruistic. We are a mix. And that's the nature of it. And we also have a complex constellation of values that are just very specific to our evolutionary history. Like, we love waterways and mountains, and the ideal place to put a house is in a mountain overlooking the water. Right? And we care a lot about our kids, and we care a little less about our cousins and even less about our fifth cousins. I mean, there are many particularities to human values, which, whether they're good or evil, depends on your perspective, really. See, I spent a lot of time in Ethiopia, in Addis Ababa, where we have one of our AI development offices for my Singularity Net project. And when I walk through the streets in Addis, there's people lying by the side of the road, just living there by the side of the road, dying probably of curable diseases without enough food or medicine. And when I walk by them, you know, I feel terrible. I give them money when I come back home to the developed world, they're not on my mind that much. I do donate some, but I mean, I also spend some of the limited money I have enjoying myself in frivolous ways rather than donating it to those people who are right now like, starving, dying and suffering on the roadside. So does that make me evil? I mean, it makes me somewhat selfish and somewhat altruistic, and we each balance that in our own way, Right? So whether that will be true of all possible AGIs is a subtler question. That's how humans are.
So you have a sense, you kind of mentioned that there's selfish. I'm not going to bring up the whole Ayn Rand idea of selfishness being the core virtue. That's a whole interesting kind of tangent that I think we'll just distract ourselves on.
I have to make one amusing comment or comment that has amused me anyway. So the. Yeah, I have extraordinary negative respect for Ayn Rand.
What's a negative respect?
But when I worked with a company called Genescent, which was evolving flies to have extraordinary long lives in Southern California. So we had flies that were evolved by artificial selection to have five times the lifespan of normal fruit flies. But the population of super long lived flies was physically sitting in a spare room at an Ayn Rand elementary school in Southern California. So that was just like. Well, if I saw this in a movie, I wouldn't believe it.
Well, yeah, the universe has a sense of humor in that kind of way that fits in. The humor fits in somehow into this whole absurd existence. But you mentioned the balance between selfishness and altruism as kind of being innate. Do you think it's possible that's kind of an emergent phenomena. Those peculiarities of our value system, how much of it is innate? How much of it is something we collectively kind of like a Dostoevsky novel, bring to life together as a civilization?
I mean, the answer to nature versus nurture is usually both. And of course it's nature versus nurture versus self organization, as you mentioned. So clearly there are evolutionary routes to individual and group selection leading to a mix of selfishness and altruism. On the other hand, different cultures manifest that in different ways, while we all have basically the same biology. And if you look at sort of pre civilized cultures, you have tribes like the Yanomamo in Venezuela, which their culture is focused on killing other tribes. And you have other stone age tribes that are mostly peaceable and have big taboos against violence. So you can certainly have a big difference in how culture manifest these innate biological characteristics. But still there's probably limits that are given by our biology. I used to argue this with my great grandparents who were Marxists actually, because they believed in the withering away of the state. They believed that as you move from capitalism to socialism to communism, people would just become more social minded so that a state would be unnecessary and people would just give everyone, would give everyone else what they needed and its evolution. And if we look at where we are in society now, people in different directions than a positive, joyous, compassionate existence, right?
