Misbehaving: being clever and wicked is a form of creativity

Creativity can bring about unchecked harm, but it's up to us how we wield it.Aeon counter – do not remove

Suppose you forgot it was your partner's birthday, but you know that they would appreciate the smallest of gestures, say a bouquet. It's late at night and no florists are open. The cemetery on your way home has recently had a funeral, and you walk across the site and pick up a good-looking bouquet of roses from someone's grave. You then head home, and the flowers are happily received by your partner.

Would you say that you hurt anyone?

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3 philosophers set up a booth on a street corner – here’s what people asked

"I should be as happy as I'm ever going to be right now, but I'm not. Is this it?"

The life choices that had led me to be sitting in a booth underneath a banner that read “Ask a Philosopher" – at the entrance to the New York City subway at 57th and 8th – were perhaps random but inevitable.

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Jordan Peterson's take on the origins of the Buddha

In this short video, he compares the outset of Buddhism with the biblical garden.

  • During this class, Jordan Peterson describes how overprotective parenting led to the creation of Buddhism.
  • Peterson compares the Buddhist origin myth with the story of Eden.
  • Both tales deal with the onset of consciousness and mortality and therefore are universal in appeal.
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Facebook and Google got rich. Users paid the price.

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  • Facebook and Google began as companies with supposedly noble purposes.
  • Creating a more connected world and indexing the world's information: what could be better than that?
  • But pressure to return value to shareholders came at the expense of their own users.
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How to be a good parent to artificial intelligence

Human values evolve. So how will we raise virtuous A.I.s?

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  • Until we can design a mind that's superhuman and flawless, we'll have to settle for instilling plain old human values into artificial intelligence. But how to do this in a world where values are constantly evolving?
  • Many of our life choices today would be considered immoral by people in the Middle Ages — or even the 1970s, says Ben Goertzel, whose family personally experienced the sad state of LGBTQ acceptance in Southern New Jersey 50 years ago.
  • Raising an A.I. is a lot like raising kids, says Goertzel. Kids don't learn best from a list of rules, but from lived experience – watching and imitating their parents. A.I.s and humans will have to play and learn side by side, and evolve together as values adapt toward an increasingly technological future.
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