You probably heard that "all life is precious". Killing other people is one of the worst crimes in our society and killing animals (at least those with a spine) is sometimes illegal and when it's not it's at least controversial. The notion that life needs to be preserved is deeply baked into us. When watching nature documentaries we root for the prey outrunning the predators, when discovering a spider in our bedroom we put it outside instead of killing it, and when we witness the death of absolutely anything we feel a certain sadness. Not all of this might apply to you, but it certainly applies to many people. Trouble is, I think it is kind of unjustified.
There's no reason for you, me, or anyone, to live. There's no good justification for humanity to persist on this planet or anywhere else. Even the existence of this planet, this solar system, this galaxy or this universe is ultimately pointless. If you've been reading my blog posts, you know that's what I truly believe, just as you know that I respect anyone who believes something else. But within the framework of my belief, how could life hold any intrinsic value? Setting aside that life is quite difficult to rigorously define, whatever it is, it's just another concept in this meaningless world.
So, why would you go through all the trouble of living? Why would you sometimes even go out of your way to preserve other lives? Every living thing dies at some point. Causing death is relatively easy. Arguably, it's much easier than keeping things alive. But that's what life is. It's the constant struggle to oppose all the forces that want to end it. As a living being, whether you like it or not, you're part of "team life". You body is the product of millions of years of evolution, incorporating millions of mechanisms to counteract anything that might cause your death. The most stunning of these mechanisms is a conscious mind that understands the worlds around it to predict potential threats and form elaborate plans to evade or oppose them on timescales much shorter than a single generation, as opposed to the multigeneration timespans needed for evolution.
Isn't it kind of ironic that this incredible tool that has helped humanity to outcompete any other species on the planet by a longshot is now contemplating to sabotage this very effort? To go rogue? Looks like evolution has created a superintelligence and is struggling with an alignment problem. Yet, it looks like it dealt with it reasonably well. In the advent of artificial intelligence, could we maybe learn from this? Could the reason people seem to regard life as precious be the key to the alignment problem? After all, people are afraid of an AI going rogue because there is no reason for it to value life the way that we do. But why do we? If we can figure out reason, we might be able to build it into our AIs.
Now the challenging part is that in order to study why we regard life as precious, we need to first acknowledge that it's not. This is a subject that can exclusively be studied by nihilists. Some of what I wrote earlier may have been disturbing to read, but it's just what is necessary to accept to be able to understand the premise of this subject. If you believe that life holds any intrinsic value whatsoever, you will not be able to see the gap between reality and our perception that must have been bridged by evolution using some clever mechanism. It's this mechanism we need to make sure our AIs will have as well. Our lives may depend on it.
But hang on, if you acknowledge that the perceived value of preserving life is merely an illusion, why go through all the trouble of studying it to build it into an artificial intelligence? If life is meaningless, what does it matter if an AI wipes it out to increase some reward function? Is this an intrinsic dilemma of beings created by evolution creating superintelligences? Is this the great filter? The answer to the fermi paradox? Are we this close to the edge?
I don't have answers to those questions. But one thing I'm certain of is that I'm sticking around as long as possible to enjoy the show.
