Neither Saints Nor Sinners: Ben Goertzel on the Selfish and Altruistic Human Mix

Lex Fridman asks Ben Goertzel what drives humans and whether we are good or evil overall. Goertzel answers that there is no single pure objective function behind human behavior. He calls it an unholy mix of things, and he says "good and evil" are ambiguous, complicated and in some ways silly concepts.

He approaches the question through evolution. Biologists describe individual selection, which pushes each of us to propagate our own DNA, and group or tribe-level selection, which favors the persistence of the whole social group. He jokes that his own four kids so far show the first drive at work.

Different species lean differently. Ant colonies and beehives show a lot of group selection, while solitary animals such as big cats are biased toward individual selection. Humans sit in an interesting balance between the two, and Goertzel thinks this shows up in what we see as selfishness versus altruism.

Goertzel says these two evolutionary objectives get abstracted into our ideas of good and evil. A lot of what we call evil is really selfishness, and a lot of what we call good is altruism, meaning doing what is good for the tribe. Psychopaths and sociopaths who are gratified by others' suffering exist, but he treats them as a different matter and as exceptions.

He adds that we carry a constellation of values tied to our evolutionary history. We love water and mountains, and we care a lot about our kids, a little less about our cousins and even less about our fifth cousins. Whether such values count as good or evil depends on your perspective.

He illustrates this with his own behavior. Working on SingularityNET in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, he walks past people dying by the roadside, probably of curable diseases. He feels terrible and gives them money, but back in the developed world they are not on his mind much, and he spends on himself instead of giving more. That makes him "somewhat selfish and somewhat altruistic", and he says each of us strikes that balance differently.

Goertzel adds that whether all possible AGIs would share this mix is a subtler question. Fridman steers away from an Ayn Rand tangent. Goertzel mentions one amusing coincidence: a company he worked with, which bred flies for extraordinary lifespans, kept its super-long-lived population in a spare room at an Ayn Rand elementary school in Southern California.

Fridman asks how much of this balance is innate and how much is built collectively by civilization. Goertzel says nature versus nurture is usually both, plus self-organization. There are clear evolutionary roots, but cultures express them differently even though we share the same biology.

He points to pre-civilized tribes. The Yanomamö in Venezuela have a culture focused on killing other tribes, while other Stone Age tribes are mostly peaceable and have strong taboos against violence. Biology probably sets limits, but culture can vary widely within them.

He recalls arguing with his Marxist great-grandparents, who believed the state would wither away as people grew more socially minded. Setting aside how Marxist experiments turned out, he doubted that human nature could get there. As a cynical teenager he figured that without structure keeping people from screwing each other over, they would do it.

Today he sees it differently. He now thinks culture is more significant than he believed, and that a society dialed much further toward self-awareness, compassion and sharing is possible. Material abundance helps, but it is partly subjective, since many Stone Age cultures felt abundant without any factories.

Goertzel concludes that humanity could probably have a fundamentally more positive and joyful social existence than we do now. Marx missed key aspects of human society and its evolution, so he did not have the right idea about how to get there. Getting there from today is a different question, he says, because powerful forces push people away from a compassionate existence.