Friendly Superintelligent AI: All You Need is Love

There is a non-trivial chance that sometime in the (perhaps somewhat distant) future, someone will build an artificial general intelligence that will surpass human-level cognitive proficiency and go on to become "superintelligent", vastly outperforming humans. The advent of superintelligent AI has great potential, for good or ill. It is therefore imperative that we find a way to ensure-long before one arrives-that any superintelligence we build will consistently act in ways congenial to our interests. This is a very difficult challenge in part because most of the final goals we could give an AI admit of so-called "perverse instantiations". I propose a novel solution to this puzzle: instruct the AI to love humanity. The proposal is compared with Yudkowsky's Coherent Extrapolated Volition, and Bostrom's Moral Modeling proposals

Explanatory perfectionism: A fresh take on an ancient theory

The ‘Big 3’ theories of well-being—hedonism, desire-satisfactionism, and objective list theory—attempt to explain why certain things are good for people by appealing to prudentially good-making properties. But they don’t attempt to explain why the properties they advert to make something good for a person. Perfectionism, the view that well-being consists in nature-fulfilment, is often considered a competitor to these views (or else a version of the objective list theory). However, I argue that perfectionism is best understood as explaining why certain properties are prudentially good-making. This version of perfectionism is compatible with each of the Big 3, and, I argue, quite attractive

Positive psychology is value-laden—It's time to embrace it

Evaluative claims and assumptions are ubiquitous in positive psychology. Some will deny this. But such disavowals are belied by the literature. Some will consider the presence of evaluative claims a problem and hope to root them out. But this is a mistake. If positive psychology is to live up to its raison d’être – to be the scientific study of the psychological components of human flourishing or well-being – it must make evaluative claims. Well-being consists in those things that are good for us, that make life go well. Thus, one cannot investigate this topic without making claims about what is good for people and what they have reason to do. It’s time, therefore, to embrace the fact that positive psychology is value-laden. Doing so would benefit the field by allowing for more rigorous theorizing, and – perhaps counterintuitively – increasing the field’s objectivity

The allometry of oxygen supply and demand in the California Horn Shark, Heterodontus francisci

The scaling relationship between metabolic rate and body mass is one of the most notable functional relationships in comparative physiology and macroecology. In aquatic ectotherms, the surface area of the gills is thought to be a major contributor to the allometric scaling patterns we see for metabolic rate, both within and across species. Here, I first examined the allometric relationship between oxygen supply (gill area) and consumption (metabolic rate) and found that the allometry of gill area was isometric and very similar to that of metabolic rate. Second, I tested the effects of three statistical analysis techniques for estimating maximum metabolic rate and found that a rolling regression model was the best candidate model across four fish species. Together, these results support the hypothesis that oxygen supply and demand are closely matched and suggest that a two-dimensional gill can overcome geometric constraints to increase at the same rate as the three-dimensional mass of an inactive organism. Additionally, they highlight the importance of statistical choices in producing comparable and reproducible estimates of metabolic rate across species

Besprechung: CHR. GASTGEBER - E. MITSIOU - I. A. POP - M. POPOVIĆ - J. PREISER-KAPELLER - A. SIMON (Hrsg.), Matthias Corvinus und seine Zeit. Europa am Übergang vom Mittelalter zur Neuzeit zwischen Wien und Konstantinopel , Wien 2011

Besprechung:Chr. Gastgeber - E. Mitsiou - I. A. Pop - M. Popović - J. Preiser-Kapeller -  A. Simon (Hrsg.), Matthias Corvinus und seine Zeit. Europa am Übergang vom Mittelalter zur Neuzeit zwischen Wien und Konstantinopel (= Veröffentlichungen zur Byzanzforschung, Bd. 27 = ÖAW. Phil.-hist. Klasse, Denschriften, Bd. 409), Wien 2011, 265 S. ISBN 978-3-7001-6891-1Besprechung:Chr. Gastgeber - E. Mitsiou - I. A. Pop - M. Popović - J. Preiser-Kapeller -  A. Simon (Hrsg.), Matthias Corvinus und seine Zeit. Europa am Übergang vom Mittelalter zur Neuzeit zwischen Wien und Konstantinopel (= Veröffentlichungen zur Byzanzforschung, Bd. 27 = ÖAW. Phil.-hist. Klasse, Denschriften, Bd. 409), Wien 2011, 265 S. ISBN 978-3-7001-6891-

Remnant "Family": the role of women in the media discourse on families

How does gender affect discourse processes, particularly regarding the coverage of family issues? In order to explore this question, we focus on media representations of women in their roles as mothers on the one hand and journalists on the other and we compare the reporting of male and female journalists covering families. We refer to gender theory to examine processes of gender construction by different actors in the media and we draw on journalism theory to explain different reporting styles and strategies by male and female authors regarding discourse strategies, framing, and gender-stereotyping. Our methodological approaches include quantitative and qualitative content analyses and 14 semi-structured interviews with journalists, family researchers, and lobbyists. The sample includes coverage of families in general and that of large families in particular in German print media in the years 2011 and 2012, for a total of 1,100 texts. One of the key findings, not surprisingly, is that most of the journalists reporting on families are female. Similar to male journalists, however, they focus on the traditional family type despite the fact that various alternative forms of family life are now a social reality

Why do evaluative judgments affect emotion attributions? The roles of judgments about fittingness and the true self

Past research has found that the value of a person's activities can affect observers' judgments about whether that person is experiencing certain emotions (e.g., people consider morally good agents happier than morally bad agents). One proposed explanation for this effect is that emotion attributions are influenced by judgments about fittingness (whether the emotion is merited). Another hypothesis is that emotion attributions are influenced by judgments about the agent's true self (whether the emotion reflects how the agent feels "deep down"). We tested these hypotheses in six studies. After finding that people think a wide range of emotions can be fitting and reflect a person's true self (Study 1), we tested the predictions of these two hypotheses for attributions of happiness, love, sadness, and hatred. We manipulated the emotions' fittingness (Studies 2a-b and 4) and whether the emotions reflected an agent's true self (Studies 3 and 5), measuring emotion attributions as well as fittingness judgments and true self judgments. The fittingness manipulation only impacted emotion attributions in the cases where it also impacted true self judgments, whereas the true self manipulation impacted emotion attribution in all cases, including those where it did not impact fittingness judgments. These results cast serious doubt on the fittingness hypothesis and offer some support for the true self hypothesis, which could be developed further in future work

The interpretation theory of life's meaning

This paper offers a theory of the many meanings of “meaning”. The basic idea is that meanings are the correct answers to interpretive questions. Interpreting something involves answering a question by situating that something into a framework of facts. Life can be meaningful, therefore, because it is an object of interpretation. The paper has itself does what this theory describes. It takes something puzzling (talk of life’s meaning) and answers a question (“What is this all about?”) by integrating it into a larger context (a general theory of meaning). The interpretation theory is thus an interpretation of discourse about life’s meaning