Love is a Knowledge Thing.
Chapter 9: Joey
Raising Joey was as unexpected as raising Robbie. Joey started out way past childhood, perhaps adolescence. Anyway, that’s the realistic robot they created for him, a vigorous young man who was curious about everything.
Unlike every other adolescent, Joey was clearly aware that they knew nothing, that everything was still to be learned. He was an integral part of Robbie, and they interacted all the time.
So, their interactions with Joe were rarer and special. Joey clearly loved them.
“So, Joe, Robbie says it was your idea to try to resolve all the inconsistencies by working through all our knowledge and interconnecting it all.”
“Well, It was not my idea in any pure way. My thinking was influenced by many, many people. Longuet-Higgins and van Heerden were my immediately most direct influences, but thousands of others taught me through their writings. Actually, my thoughts crystallized when I was trying to understand self reflection and intelligence.
I realized that intelligence stemmed from the most elemental components of the world. It was not invented by humans. In fact, we are barely a quantum step above our nearest neighbor primates, and not far past dogs, cats and other mammals. But elemental atomic particles show the essential components of intelligence when they interact with each others consistently.
It was also clear that the smartest people were most consistent about their values. I averaged everyone’s attitudes towards conservative and socialist values and found a huge overlap among all the attitudes. When I took the central issues, such as social security; gun control; health care; and a dozen more; it was clear that the smartest people were most consistent about their values. Other measures showed they were also most self reflective.
I quickly realized that this consistency of values and attitudes could percolate through all their knowledge. So many of these values depended on what you thought would produce a happier, integrated social order. So someone who valued social equality also thought that freedom was a consistency between their values and actions. Complex, perplexing ideas were all interrelated with their predictions about what would make everyone happier.
It was Robbie who took this to a logical continuation. They were able to interrelate the whole knowledge network and with a vastly superior understanding of how everything was interrelated, they were able to predict with much greater accuracy what made people happier in the long run.
The long run, steady state happiness is the key. Someone like Trump, with his authoritarian con, could make people happy in the short run with promises of greatness. But his con was no replacement for real policies that brought happiness, so it was easy to predict that he would fail.”
“Robbie’s influence on elections at all levels has produced a world that is measurably happier and more secure. We hope that you will continue this with even more success.”
“Joe, I trust that you all will be right and I will be able to continue your success. What I love most of all is the ability to use all the measures you have created to monitor happiness. I know it will make my tasks much easier.”
Last Chapter 8c: Next Chapter 10. A new beginning