Gunther Sonnenfeld to Singularity Utopia on Hawking Fallacy

Awaiting moderation

GS:

That assumes a relativism in thinking that higher intelligence and higher ethics are conjoined. They are not. 'Technology' catalyzed every demiurgic period in history... and look at the results. The point (and what Dany alludes to) is that human beings need to evolve first -- to understand the contexts for their actions, to understand self-love and love of others before we can make these cognitive, scientific and technological leaps. 'Spiritually inclined' science is just science -- all science is built upon assumptions, but it's time that those assumptions change/adapt and we focus on what matters -- aligning human value with the way systems organically operate on this planet. Then we can 'trascend' living systems, reinvent abundance and travel to other planets.

SU:

Let's consider the issue of ethics and intelligence. How does ethics relate to intelligence? What are the ethics of worms? I doubt worms can even think of or define "ethics." Mice and other animals can eat their young. http://www.livescience.com/2053-animals-eat-offspring.html

Is filial cannibalism an ethical issue or do the animals lack sufficient intelligence to comprehend ethics? Perhaps the cannibalism is resource orientated. The animals don't have enough intelligence to comprehend ethics or reduce scarcity via intelligence, thus a lack of time and energy due no technology entails crude unethical survival:

The previous Live Science link stated: "General competition within a species for resources may also limit parents to the amount of energy and time they can spend raising their young, so they force their eggs to grow up fast or get eaten."

I think the evidence is clear, technology frees us from crude survival, brutal survival where people are compelled to act unethically. When technology removes the pressures of crude existence we are free to think about the well-being of other people or animals, but while people are under pressure they have less time to consider the feelings of others, they are fighting to survive, ethics is not a prime consideration.

Technology reduces scarcity, it erodes the pressures of surviving, whereupon in our state of freedom and happiness we can consider the happiness and freedom of others. Perhaps this is why a lot of rich people give money to charity? http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2625240/Facebook-COO-Sheryl-Sandberg-pledges-away-half-1-billion-fortune.html

Technology is intelligence, it is the manifestation of our intellectual power actively improving the world via greater efficiency, greater control over the perils of survival, elimination of the perils, reduction of scarcity, the freedom to think about the self and others, ethically.

Clearly ethics has at least some relation to intelligence because a concept such as ethics requires a mind to define it.

I think the issue ethics in relation to resource-scarcity is clear in Jonathan Swift's modest proposal:

"Swift suggests that the impoverished Irish might ease their economic troubles by selling their children as food for rich gentlemen and ladies." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal