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The Multiverse According to Ben
Today (as a consequence of my role in the IEET), I gave a brief invited talk at the National Defense University, in Washington DC, about the ethics of autonomous robot missiles and war vehicles and “battlebots” (my word, not theirs in general….

Part of me wanted to bring a guitar and serenade the crowd (consisting perhaps 50% of uniformed officers) with “Give Peace a Chance” by John Lennon and “Masters of War” by Bob Dylan … but due to the wisdom of my 43 years of age I resisted the urge ;-p

Anyway the world seems very different than it did in the early 1970s when I accompanied my parents on numerous anti-Vietnam-war marches. I remain generally anti-violence and anti-war, but my main political focus now is on encouraging a smooth path toward a positive Singularity. To the extent that military force may be helpful toward achieving this end it has to be considered as a potentially positive thing….

My talk didn’t cover any new ground (to me); after some basic transhumanist rhetoric I discussed my notion of different varieties of ethics as corresponding to different types of memory (declarative ethics, sensorimotor ethics, procedural ethics, episodic ethics, etc.), and the need for ethical synergy among different ethics types, in parallel with cognitive synergy among different memory/cognition types. For the low-down on this see a previous blog post on the topic.

But some of the other talks and lunchroom discussions were interesting to me, as the community of military officers is rather different from the circles I usually mix in…

One of the talks before mine was a prerecorded talk (robo-talk?) on whether it’s …






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