[Bmi] I was banned from connectionist mailing list?

[Ben Goertzel]

Hi John,

> What "different outlook" do you suggest?

Ah, damn non-AGI autocomplete!!  I meant "different outlet"

What I suggest is that you start a separate politics blog or magazine
if you want to post stuff that is entirely or 90% about politics
rather than directly about brain science.    Trying to get
brain-science folks to regularly pay attention to your political views
isn't gonna work; this audience is just gonna tune out and stop
reading the magazine entirely, because to them the politics is noise
and they prefer information sources with a higher signal/noise ratio
...

> Your second point makes a lot of sense.  For that reason, many Chinese
> have also hated me.   If you can find a person or use a web to translate
> from
> Chinese to English, the following is my latest blog in the ScienceNet. It
> directly addresses the safety of Mr. Xi Jinping after his term is over.

I recently spoke (on the future of AI) at the BoAo Forum, the largest
economics forum in China.   Xi Jinping was the keynote speaker and
there was tremendous security surrounding him.   The gossip was that
there had been 4-5 serious assassination attempts against him already
this year.  Probably due to his anti-corruption efforts, which have
pissed off many high-level generals in the army.   Trying to clean up
the army is a dangerous thing.   I think one of the attempts may have
come from within his own security forces, intended to protect him; so
he had to clean up his own security forces as well....  So yeah,
whatever you think about his politics, he sure has a dangerous job...

> My wife said that somebody might create a traffic accident to wipe me out
> when I visit China.

I don't think you have enough influence that they would bother with
that at the moment....   But yeah, the safety of Xi Jinping is
probably a sore point, so if you get a big audience in China for
writings that seem to be threatening to Xi Jinping, you could find
yourself unpopular with the Chinese gov't.

I Google Translated your Chinese-language blog post and asked my wife
(who is mainland Chinese from Anhui Province) to read it, and we feel
it doesn't rise to the level that would really alarm the gov't if they
read it.

I don't want to digress this email list into a Chinese politics
discussion.  But I will say that, while I'm not a fan of all the
Chinese gov't policies, on balance they're not terrible in comparison
to the gov't's of other developing countries.   It's a troubled world
we live in.   I've spent a fair bit of time in Africa recently and
with a few exceptions, the situation there is worse.   I co-founded an
AI development office in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia -- which is possible
there because it's reasonable politically stable at this point; but as
in China, the stability is bought at a price in terms of quashing of
dissent.   Publicly speaking against the Ethiopian gov't, within
Ethiopia, will probably get you a bad outcome faster than doing
something comparable in China.  Yet I can't deny the Ethiopian gov't
is doing way better than most African gov't's...

As you say the problem ultimately comes down to the human brain and
its functioning, individually and in collective...   Individual brains
and societal structures co-adapt, and we see this throughout history
-- and I think society and gov't on the whole are more humane now than
100, 500 or 1000 years ago, so I think we're advancing.  But relative
to our individual lifespans, the advancement is not that fast.

Ergo the need for benevolent robot dictators, right?  But I digress
from the digression 8-D

-- Ben