why exactly do you need a deity to tell you to love your fellow man? Do you need god in your life to want to love your children? I think this is not quite right. I don't expect that the desire to create these tools independent of outcome in the valley is simply about greed , and for companies like anthropic, the ability to use AGI fear as a means to drive investment in themselves from VC class that lives the idea of obliterating human labor. We need less money in tech - we'll probably get it soon enough.
> why exactly do you need a deity to tell you to love your fellow man?
Because that is not a given, as shown by the entirety of human history. Without God, the only arguments for love, or what is right, is just what people think/feel/agree on at a certain time and place, which has a lot of variations and is definitely not universal.
> Do you need god in your life to want to love your children?
Most people don't need God to love their children, and the ones that don't might not be convinced otherwise by God.
That said, what do you do exactly for that love? Do you cheat and steal to guarantee their future over others? If not because of some "benefit to society" logical argument that would convince no-one, why would one even care about that and not exploit society for their own benefit?
Almost everyone loves themselves and their family above all others. Only God can tell you to love your neighbors and even your enemies.
There are still many societies around the world where most people are mostly self centered and you can see the results. You are taking for granted many values you have, as if you arrived to them logically and indipendently instead of learning them from your parents and a society that derived them from God for centuries.
Are we completely ignoring the tonnes of awful things people have done in the name of their god? Belief in a higher power doesn't automatically make you good/bad. The same is true of the inverse.
>Without God, the only arguments for love, or what is right, is just what people think/feel/agree on at a certain time and place, which has a lot of variations and is definitely not universal.
Lets ignore that laws exist for a second....Does god say everybody in Manhattan should reserve the left side of the escalators for people walking up them, and the right should be left for people just standing and escalating? No, but somehow a majority of the population figured it out. Society still has rules, both spoken and unspoken, whether god is in the picture or not
If you are serious about these questions, read Dominion by Tom Holland. He makes a very long and thorough historical case that Christianity has contributed more good than bad over the centuries. (I don’t know what comparable works are for other religions.)
Decoupled from the social systems built by organized religion, our “elites” are taking society to a horrific place.
Could you build up traditions and social structures over time without any deity that would withstand the hedonism and nihilism driving modern culture? Perhaps. But it would require time measured in generations we don’t have.
At the very least , it takes generations to build up shared traditions and values across a society. If you want an atheistic version of that, you would need to start now and it’s going to take a long time to build.
> If you want an atheistic version of that, you would need to start now and it’s going to take a long time to build.
Why do you think we would have to start from zero? Even in highly religious countries not all traditions and values are tied to religion, and even those that are can be disconnected from their religious roots.
I would just say the success rate hasn't been very high so far.
The current evidence suggests that as people have become less religious, society has become more fragmented and individualistic, with less shared values and less sense of community or family.
Shared religious community has been replaced by quality time with screens, not meeting in person in some alternative atheistic community.
Writing off an entire facet of life as toxic, is toxic.
Anything taken to extreme can be harmful, but some of the most grounded and successful (as in, living well) people I know are those with a self-aware religious foundation to lean on. People may bring up examples of religious cults as a reason to discard all religion, but surely the same could be said for the many secular cults. We shouldn't throw out the baby with the bathwater, as they say.
We don't need religion for that, humanism exists a way of living for instance.
I don't think (most) people treat science "as a religion".
Some tech leaders seem to have swap Ayn Rand (who if you look at the early days definitely acted like a cult leader), to this AI doomer cult, and as a result seem to be acting terribly.
Religion was much wider spread in the 1800s, but that didn't stop industrialists acting terribly.
