CMV: It is worth the risk to humanity to create an artificial intelligent computer or other intelligent lifeform.
Let me start off with a thought experiment I'll probably mangle that I read a few years ago.
Imagine a utopia in the future, a perfect world with no crime, no poverty, no health problems. Everyone there is challenged enough to be happy without any desperation. Would this be a good thing? Would you be in favor of this future world?
What if I told you that everyone in the future world is Muslim and of middle eastern decent. No other races or ideologies in the whole planet. Is this future still good?
A feel like a lot of people would balk at this idea because of an innate evolutionary desire to spread our own personal genes and in a broader more cerebral sense to propagate our own ideology and ways of life. We want a future full of people "like us". But I don't believe in a strictly moral sense that a good future has to have people like myself in it. It just has to be good.
​
In the book "Children of Time" (amazing book btw. Highly recommend it), one of the primary conflicts is that some humans want to seed planets with an altered form of earth life so that life can spread through the cosmos even if humanity fails. Kind of hedging the bets so intelligent life has a better chance of continuing. Many people are aggressively opposed to this line of thinking (the "exultation of beasts"), reasonably asserting this would arbitrarily create competition for future humans and possibly lead to a certain degree of risk for the species as a whole.
​
Humans have a precarious future ahead of us. Evidence suggests that there is a 1/5 chance that we, as a species, won't even make it 200 more years. [https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/reports/2008-1.pdf](https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/reports/2008-1.pdf)
My view is that:
\-It is important for intelligent life to exist or else there is nothing to appreciate the universe for what it is.
\-Humans (and to a lesser degree other earth life) is so far the only intelligent life discovered and there is a non-zero chance that it intelligence could be a vanishingly rare phenomena
\-A good future can exist even if it involves those who are different than myself
All of these points together mean that, even if there is a certain degree of risk involved, it is worth it to propagate life in the universe if we're some day able to create it whether that life is some sort of super-intelligent AI or altered earth life like in Children of Time.
​
What won't change my mind:
\-Don't argue with the veracity of the source. It's unreasonable to assume that humanity will exist for all eternity even if you don't agree with the source. Now if you want to prove that there's a good reason to think humanity will last forever fine, but don't make that argument based on a negative assertion of my source. the source being wrong != you being right.
Edit: to sum up the deltas so far: people may have values differing from those that want to see life diversify and continue. Any effort to seed life elsewhere should be done with those values in mind. Basically don't make an AI if it's gonna risk the people on earth currently