Comments on: Standing up to the Age of Emotions https://groundviews.org/2015/11/16/standing-up-to-the-age-of-emotions/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=standing-up-to-the-age-of-emotions Journalism for Citizens Thu, 19 Nov 2015 03:26:00 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.1 By: puniselva https://groundviews.org/2015/11/16/standing-up-to-the-age-of-emotions/#comment-60412 Thu, 19 Nov 2015 03:26:00 +0000 http://groundviews.org/?p=18557#comment-60412 ”The basic rule of the Age of Emotions is this: unless we respect emotions, unless we stop cultivating negative and destructive emotions – emotions will not respect us. In fact they will destroy us”:

Successive Sri Lankan governments have been inciting hatred(leading to negative and destructive emotions) through i.textbooks, ii.speeches on political platforms iii.racial riots and iv. political, economic and legal discrimination and thus brought about the ethnic conflict to this day.

Thus peacebuilding(=developing positive emotions) in Sri Lanka needs UNESCO to supervise revision of school textbooks:
https://www.scribd.com/doc/211491454/Peacebuilding-in-Sri-Lanka-Needs-UNESCO-to-Supervise-Revision-of-School-Textbooks – Groundviews, please allow the weblink to help the readers access numerous sources of crucial information needed for rising young parliamentarians representatives of whom admitted their ignorance of post-independence history to the SriLankan diaspora in London a few yrs back.

]]> By: Nick Hart https://groundviews.org/2015/11/16/standing-up-to-the-age-of-emotions/#comment-60410 Tue, 17 Nov 2015 04:38:00 +0000 http://groundviews.org/?p=18557#comment-60410 ‘Greed, hatred and corruption’. ‘Examine our own history’. Both are the products of human nature, and human nature is what it evolved to be. So do we leave our future evolutionary path to chance—let nature take its course, more of the same—or do we do something about it?

Rapid advances in DNA engineering have shown that we can indeed ‘do something about it’. We can engineer-out the fundamental evolutionary compulsions, modify the underlying compulsion to survive and multiply at all costs that is the cornerstone of greed, hatred and corruption. In short, we can make better human beings.

But the existential questions will remain: what is a human being? What is ‘human nature’? Are they terms that can only be applied to what evolution—nature—creates when left to its own devices? Or can the concepts themselves evolve to include engineered ‘human’ life forms better suited to coexist free of the evolutionary compulsions to survive and multiply at any cost?

Those questions might be answered for us as we create artificial intelligence (AI) machines that increasingly blur the distinctions between ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’. There is already a widening debate on what our moral and legal obligations are and will be to the intelligent and (quasi) conscious machines that we create. Perhaps we should extend that debate to include ourselves.

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