Isaac Asimov had these rules for robots of not doing harm, etc, and there was a group on data governance about a year ago, and the single rule that came out of it was that humans should flourish. I think that’s a valuable principle to have in the development of new technology.
Venki Ramakrishnan, in "[Kazuo Ishiguro and Venki Ramakrishnan: imagining a new humanity](https://www.ft.com/content/eca7988d-2961-4b27-9368-ff58c966e969)"
I’ve mentioned before Ruth Benedict’s notion of ‘synergy’ as a spectrum along which cultures differ as to how well the humans who enact those cultures flourish. This has also been called a differentiation of life-affirming vs. life-denying cultures. Erich Fromm, in The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (1973), framed it more starkly as necrophilic vs. biophilic cultures, with the speculation that our industrialized societies were necrophilic, drawn to and valorizing non-living mechanism over life. Picking up the theme of The Sane Society (1955), he held that in an insane social system it is the sane people who most experience psychological distress, not those who are ‘adjusted’ to the social order. How to flourish within (or anyway in relation to) the prevailing social arrangements is an important control problem.
Ishiguro and Ramakrishnan are two nobel laureates, one in literature and the other in chemistry. Their discussion of impending/actual issues of AI, genetic tinkering, surveillance/recognition, data farming (we are not the customers, that’s those who buy the ads; we aren’t even the product, we are the arable land), etc. is a discussion in which change to system concepts must a crucial role before sequence, program, and even principle control is taken from us by our inventions.
We need publications placing the PCT perspective squarely in this discussion of principles and systems. In my present circumstances I can’t undertake that, but I can contribute at whatever level is helpful.
Read at least the Ishiguro-Ramakrishnan conversation first before replying, please.