Are Humans Good or Evil? (Ben Goertzel) | AI Podcast Clips with Lex Fridman
00:00:00.000 | What do you think about the will to power?
00:00:03.800 | What do you think drives humans?
00:00:07.560 | Is it ...
00:00:08.560 | - Oh, an unholy mix of things.
00:00:11.120 | I don't think there's one pure, simple, and elegant objective function driving humans
00:00:17.520 | by any means.
00:00:18.520 | - What do you think ... I know it's hard to look at humans in an aggregate, but do you
00:00:24.600 | think overall humans are good, or do we have both good and evil within us that, depending
00:00:33.480 | on the circumstances, depending on whatever can percolate to the top?
00:00:39.360 | - Good and evil are very ambiguous, complicated, and in some ways silly concepts.
00:00:46.960 | But if we could dig into your question from a couple directions.
00:00:50.680 | So I think if you look in evolution, humanity is shaped both by individual selection and
00:00:59.440 | what biologists would call group selection, like tribe level selection, right?
00:01:03.800 | So individual selection has driven us in a selfish DNA sort of way, so that each of us
00:01:11.640 | does to a certain approximation what will help us propagate our DNA to future generations.
00:01:18.360 | I mean, that's why I've got four kids so far, and probably that's not the last one.
00:01:24.960 | On the other hand ...
00:01:25.960 | - I like the ambition.
00:01:26.960 | - Tribal, like group selection, means humans in a way will do what will advocate for the
00:01:33.880 | persistence of the DNA of their whole tribe, or their social group.
00:01:39.280 | And in biology, you have both of these, right?
00:01:42.820 | And you can see, say, an ant colony or a beehive, there's a lot of group selection in the evolution
00:01:48.220 | of those social animals.
00:01:49.960 | On the other hand, say, a big cat or some very solitary animal, it's a lot more biased
00:01:55.240 | toward individual selection.
00:01:57.820 | Humans are an interesting balance, and I think this reflects itself in what we would view
00:02:03.360 | as selfishness versus altruism, to some extent.
00:02:07.800 | So we just have both of those objective functions contributing to the makeup of our brains.
00:02:15.000 | And then, as Nietzsche analyzed in his own way, and others have analyzed in different
00:02:19.680 | ways, I mean, we abstract this as, well, we have both good and evil within us, right?
00:02:26.400 | Because a lot of what we view as evil is really just selfishness, and a lot of what we view
00:02:32.160 | as good is altruism, which means doing what's good for the tribe.
00:02:38.300 | And on that level, we have both of those just baked into us, and that's how it is.
00:02:44.180 | Of course, there are psychopaths and sociopaths and people who get gratified by the suffering
00:02:51.660 | of others, and that's a different thing.
00:02:56.160 | - Yeah, those are exceptions, but on the whole.
00:02:58.360 | - Yeah, but I think at core, we're not purely selfish, we're not purely altruistic, we are
00:03:05.440 | a mix, and that's the nature of it.
00:03:09.200 | And we also have a complex constellation of values that are just very specific to our
00:03:17.400 | evolutionary history.
00:03:21.400 | We love waterways and mountains, and the ideal place to put a house is on a mountain overlooking
00:03:26.380 | the water, right?
00:03:27.380 | And we care a lot about our kids, and we care a little less about our cousins, and even
00:03:33.940 | less about our fifth cousins.
00:03:35.360 | I mean, there are many particularities to human values, which, whether they're good
00:03:42.360 | or evil, depends on your perspective.
00:03:47.600 | I spent a lot of time in Ethiopia, in Addis Ababa, where we have one of our AI development
00:03:52.720 | offices for my SingularityNet project.
00:03:55.600 | And when I walk through the streets in Addis, there's people lying by the side of the road,
00:04:03.440 | living there by the side of the road, dying probably of curable diseases without enough
00:04:07.120 | food or medicine.
00:04:08.960 | And when I walk by them, I feel terrible, I give them money.
00:04:12.480 | When I come back home to the developed world, they're not on my mind that much.
00:04:17.520 | I do donate some, but I also spend some of the limited money I have enjoying myself in
00:04:24.660 | frivolous ways, rather than donating it to those people who are right now starving, dying,
00:04:30.240 | and suffering on the roadside.
00:04:32.040 | So, does that make me evil?
00:04:33.720 | I mean, it makes me somewhat selfish and somewhat altruistic, and we each balance that in our
00:04:41.000 | own way, right?
00:04:42.440 | So, whether that will be true of all possible AGIs is a subtler question.
00:04:51.160 | That's how humans are.
00:04:52.160 | - So, you have a sense, you kind of mentioned that there's a selfish, I'm not gonna bring
00:04:57.240 | up the whole Ayn Rand idea of selfishness being the core virtue, that's a whole interesting
00:05:03.120 | kind of tangent that I think we'll just distract ourselves on.
00:05:07.320 | - I have to make one amusing comment.
00:05:09.480 | - Sure.
00:05:10.480 | - A comment that has amused me anyway.
00:05:13.080 | So, I have extraordinary negative respect for Ayn Rand.
00:05:18.520 | - Negative, what's a negative respect?
00:05:22.280 | - When I worked with a company called Genescient, which was evolving flies to have extraordinary
00:05:28.800 | long lives in Southern California.
00:05:32.240 | So we had flies that were evolved by artificial selection to have five times the lifespan
00:05:37.200 | of normal fruit flies, but the population of super long-lived flies was physically sitting
00:05:43.960 | in a spare room at an Ayn Rand elementary school in Southern California.
00:05:49.120 | So that was just like, well, if I saw this in a movie, I wouldn't believe it.
00:05:54.080 | - Well, yeah, the universe has a sense of humor in that kind of way.
00:05:57.800 | That fits in, humor fits in somehow into this whole absurd existence.
00:06:01.760 | But you mentioned the balance between selfishness and altruism as kind of being innate.
00:06:08.240 | Do you think it's possible that's kind of an emergent phenomenon, those peculiarities
00:06:14.400 | of our value system?
00:06:16.520 | How much of it is innate?
00:06:18.240 | How much of it is something we collectively, kind of like a Dostoevsky novel, bring to
00:06:23.560 | life together as a civilization?
00:06:25.440 | - I mean, the answer to nature versus nurture is usually both.
00:06:30.120 | And of course, it's nature versus nurture versus self-organization, as you mentioned.
00:06:35.800 | So clearly, there are evolutionary roots to individual and group selection leading to
00:06:42.780 | a mix of selfishness and altruism.
00:06:44.880 | On the other hand, different cultures manifest that in different ways.
00:06:50.720 | Well, we all have basically the same biology.
00:06:53.480 | And if you look at sort of pre-civilized cultures, you have tribes like the Yanomamo in Venezuela,
00:07:00.680 | which their culture is focused on killing other tribes.
00:07:06.520 | And you have other Stone Age tribes that are mostly peaceable and have big taboos against
00:07:11.800 | violence.
00:07:12.800 | So you can certainly have a big difference in how culture manifests these innate biological
00:07:20.240 | characteristics.
00:07:21.240 | But still, you know, there's probably limits that are given by our biology.
00:07:27.600 | I used to argue this with my great-grandparents, who were Marxists, actually, because they
00:07:33.280 | believed in the withering away of the state.
00:07:36.320 | They believed that as you move from capitalism to socialism to communism, people would just
00:07:42.280 | become more social-minded, so that a state would be unnecessary, and everyone would give
00:07:49.380 | everyone else what they needed.
00:07:52.040 | Now, setting aside that that's not what the various Marxist experiments on the planet
00:07:57.520 | seemed to be heading toward in practice, just as a theoretical point, I was very dubious
00:08:04.680 | that human nature could go there.
00:08:08.480 | Like at that time, when my great-grandparents were alive, I was just like, you know, I'm
00:08:13.040 | a cynical teenager.
00:08:14.160 | I think humans are just jerks.
00:08:17.000 | The state is not going to wither away.
00:08:19.080 | If you don't have some structure keeping people from screwing each other over, they're going
00:08:23.200 | to do it.
00:08:24.200 | So now I actually don't quite see things that way.
00:08:27.200 | I mean, I think my feeling now, subjectively, is the culture aspect is more significant
00:08:33.520 | than I thought it was when I was a teenager.
00:08:35.680 | And I think you could have a human society that was dialed dramatically further toward
00:08:42.960 | self-awareness, other awareness, compassion, and sharing than our current society.
00:08:48.040 | And of course, greater material abundance helps, but to some extent, material abundance
00:08:54.400 | is a subjective perception also, because many Stone Age cultures perceived themselves as
00:08:59.240 | living in great material abundance.
00:09:01.640 | They had all the food and water they wanted.
00:09:03.040 | They lived in a beautiful place.
00:09:04.720 | They had sex lives.
00:09:07.560 | They had children.
00:09:08.560 | I mean, they had abundance without any factories, right?
00:09:13.980 | So I think humanity probably would be capable of fundamentally more positive and joy-filled
00:09:21.640 | mode of social existence than what we have now.
00:09:27.440 | Clearly, Marx didn't quite have the right idea about how to get there.
00:09:32.720 | I mean, he missed a number of key aspects of human society and its evolution.
00:09:40.560 | And if we look at where we are in society now, how to get there is a quite different
00:09:46.280 | question because there are very powerful forces pushing people in different directions than
00:09:52.120 | a positive, joyous, compassionate existence, right?
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