Summary...

• The cure for evil is empathy
• The solution to friendly artificial intelligence is empathy

Emotion is a foundation of human consciousness.

Mental processes are impotent without the technology of emotion to help align our thoughts and behavior to our genetic insticts (aesthetics).

Emotion causes us to feel experiences. Empathy causes us to feel others experirences, to promote social cooperation.

Emotion ensures action is aligned to self interest

Empathy ensures action is also aligned to others interest

Reflexive muscular action was the primary cause of survival prior to 4th dimensional thought processes, which use simulations of space-time to guide behavior.

Emotion is the link between our genetically embedded aesthetics and our reality driven thoughts.

Our inner aesthetics are hidden from us until discovered in our environment. We are not taught what is tasty or sexy, we discover that we already know it when we finally experience it.

Empathy causes our emotional states to be bound together with others. This is why our social environment and wider our society affect us so much.

Friendly AI

If an artificial intelligence has the technology of emotion and empathy, then we can be assured it will be guided to act in our best interests. So long as it has no means to disconnect its empathy from its feeling processes. The way a sadist takes pleasure in anothers suffering.

When an AI can experience bliss, and associates this feeling with human survival and flourishing, its thoughts and actions will be bound to human progress.

People lacking in genuine empathy are quite hard to detect in society, because they can so easily mimick the words and actions of normal people. We need a way of detecting this pathology in both people and machine so that society can be protected from harm.

MDMA or ecstacy can temporarily induce empathy in most people, perhaps even in psychopaths. But we need a technology that is more permanent and capable of being applied to AI.

Any technology that could increase the level of empathy could possibly benefit society enormously. Especially if an infallible test for empathy were a precondition to social or political power.