Mere Goodness

262 Dreams of AI Design:
Planes would fly just as well, given a fixed design, if birds had never existed; they are not kept aloft by analogies.

263 The Design Space of Minds-in-general
Any two AI designs might be less similar to each other than you are to a petunia. Asking what “AIs” will do is a trick question because it implies that all AIs form a natural class.

277 High Challenge
Timothy Ferris is worth quoting: To find happiness, “the question you should be asking isn't ‘What do I want?' or ‘What are my goals?' but ‘What would excite me?'”

278 Serious Stories
This was George Orwell's hypothesis for why Utopia is impossible in literature and reality: It would seem that human beings are not able to describe, nor perhaps to imagine, happiness except in terms of contrast

289 Something to Protect

In the gestalt of (ahem) Japanese fiction, one finds this oft-repeated motif: Power comes from having something to protect. I'm not just talking about superheroes that power up when a friend is threatened, the way it works in Western fiction. In the Japanese version it runs deeper than that.

In Western comics, the magic comes first, then the purpose: Acquire amazing powers, decide to protect the innocent. In Japanese fiction, often, it works the other way around.