Google’s Utilitarianism

[Syne]

I probably first read about cognitive dissonance studying development psychology in my early twenties.

[C C]

[...] Jodi Halpern asked an interesting question during this talk.  If there was an electrode that could be planted in your brain that had the capacity to make better decisions for you, and provide the best possible outcome, so that you’d have a better life, would you do it? [...] Here I am telling Syne that I want freewill, which I’m not entirely sure that I even have, but would I be willing to give it up if artificial intelligence was able provide me with the best possible outcome? I don’t know. Would you? If we shifted our decision making to AI, would that reduce our accountabitly?

We acquire, rather than being born with, most of the concepts / memes that manage our mature stages of decision-making, anyway. So essentially whatever we assimilate becomes us or the growth of "who we are", regardless of whether the developments are culturally marketed abstractions or technological implants.

For thousands of years we've arguably been parceling out remembering to invented external agencies and conducting some of our cognitive operations externally. [Or at least the last few centuries of more literate in general populations.] So that the actual "new" here might only be that the artificial stuff is migrating inward to our skulls rather than remaining outside. Long before the advent of computers, it could even be contended that we had been parasitizing numbers of each other to carry out burdensome thought procedures. "...each individual human brain, thanks to its communicative links, is the beneficiary of the cognitive labors of the others in a way that gives it unprecedented powers". --DD[*]

So as long as we voluntarily accepted the AI being integrated with our identity, such would, again, seem to just be another coping tool of external origin that we added to ourselves along the way. Might be more authentic or seem more native to us if it was done during childhood rather than adulthood, though. And obviously there is potential threat of mental manipulation by the state (backdoor in the implant or wireless linkage to an artilect provider). Though propaganda and brainwashing are the already existing longtime antecedents of such for administrative departments (i.e., merely a futuristic upgrade).

Background: Human brains have been shrinking for 20,000 years, losing a tennis-ball size amount of mass. Some scientists feel that the EQ hasn't really been maintained either over the interval since our distant ancestors -- that being less brawny doesn't fully account for the drop. Although it's probably a combination of factors starting with the introduction of agriculture, one submitted explanation is that the shrinkage accelerated when individuals began subcontracting their storage of memory and processing of information to external writing and drawings -- and later audio/film recording mediums, computers, etc.

Also, due to an uptick in sapience-detracting mutations since our reaching a peak in pre-agrarian times, one head geneticist (Gerald Crabtree) proposed that our intellectual abilities and emotional stability have especially declined over the last two-plus millennia. Wagering that "if an average citizen from Athens of 1000BC were to appear suddenly among us, he or she would be among the brightest and most intellectually alive of our colleagues and companions, with a good memory, a broad range of ideas and a clear-sighted view of important issues."

Human intelligence 'peaked thousands of years ago and we've been on an intellectual and emotional decline ever since'
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/scienc...07101.html

Why Have Our Brains Started to Shrink?
https://www.scientificamerican.com/artic...to-shrink/

If Modern Humans Are So Smart, Why Are Our Brains Shrinking?
http://discovermagazine.com/2010/sep/25-...-shrinking

Farming to blame for our shrinking size and brains
https://phys.org/news/2011-06-farming-bl...rains.html

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[*] Daniel Dennett: "Comparing our brains with bird brains or dolphin brains is almost beside the point, because our brains are in effect joined together into a single cognitive system that dwarfs all others. They are joined by one of the innovations that has invaded our brains and no others: language. I am not making the foolish claim that all our brains are knit together by language into one gigantic mind, thinking its transnational thoughts, but rather that each individual human brain, thanks to its communicative links, is the beneficiary of the cognitive labors of the others in a way that gives it unprecedented powers. Naked animal brains are no match at all for the heavily armed and outfitted brains we carry in our heads." --The Role of Language in Intelligence

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