(July 22, 2017 at 10:38 am)Astonished Wrote:(July 22, 2017 at 6:57 am)mordant Wrote: And now we're back to, we need suffering or life would be boring / drab / we'd be robots. Clearly this notion is not confined to fundamentalists.
The problem with the OP scenario isn't that it'd be boring, it's that we wouldn't be free. And that's the conundrum of the human condition: you can try to accelerate dealing with human suffering by being controlling of people's freedom of choice, but then you just replace suffering from stupidity with suffering from authoritarianism, which always ends up being corrupted.
Maybe some alien stepping in would have a different psychology and wouldn't be subject to "absolute power corrupts absolutely" but I don't know. It would probably end up like the Twilight Zone episode where seemingly benevolent aliens put up force fields around each country so there can't be war, show us how to have more effective agriculture, etc., but in the end their book To Serve Man turns out to be a COOKBOOK.
Thank you, I was wondering why so many people were having such a weird hangup about that misapprehension.
But for the sake of this hypothetical, because this authoritarian force is beyond human, the assumption is that they are either prohibited from becoming corrupt via programming (in the case of the I, Robot androids) or because they are already in possession of such power and technology that humans have nothing to offer and therefore need not be exploited, which the Overlords from Childhood's End fall under. Or whatever other superior entities would be capable of a global overnight reformation. With a prerogative of benevolence, regardless of (one would think, more or less reasonable) restrictions on personal freedoms. So we're not going the 'are they going to stab us in the back' route here, just for simplicity.
If you stop thinking and doing for yourself you are just a helpless newborn baby. Would you like to live to be 100 years old but never advance beyond the attributes of a one-day old baby?
