Anything is rational/logical if it achieves the desired goal.

Some goals are perhaps more rational than others, but what truly is a “rational” goal? Even survival, which could be considered the ultimately rational objective, is really an instinct, not a reasoned choice. Unless one’s survival is actually just a means to a deeper end, like living long enough to raise children to adulthood. Then pursuing one’s survival, an instinctive end, at least becomes a rational means to achieve the end of offspring survival.

Even that is instinctive, too.

Not to stand against either reason or logic of course. But I can’t quite enthrone them at the top of the decision tree.

I think the factor you are leaving out is that there ain’t no “rational actors” when people are involved. Were they rational, things would get worked out without the waste of war. Competition would be on a level that enabled both parties to survive.

The construct should be “tends towards rational”, rather than “fully rational in an ideal sense”. Because, believe me, the rational goes right out the window once you get people involved, even with the most saintly examples thereof.

Wilson wasn’t rational, either–He and the rest of his lot were just better at selling the line of BS that he and they were actually rational, or at least, more rational than the rest of the world. Time has shown the folly of his ideas–We can just look at the impact that the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire has had, in the post-WWI era. The irony is that Europe is seemingly hell-bent on recreating the damn thing, with even more problematic issues than the original, and trying to encompass the entire subcontinent. It ain’t going to work any better than previous iterations…

Rational actors don’t guarantee peace. They don’t even guarantee no accidental wars. They do tend to settle earlier and keep agreements better.

A Wilsonian peace based on universal rationalism is simply wrong.

The thing with the Singularity is that it’s a piece of conjecture, a thought-experiment. Computation ain’t sentience, or we’d see precursors of it right now. I don’t think we’re gonna get rescued by the mind-cowboys of the Singularity come to save us from ourselves, at all. It’s more likely to be a lot of hard work that most people aren’t going to want to put in, and as per the usual run of human endeavors, there’s gonna be a lot of useless straphangers holding things back.

What I’m getting at, with that, is the drag effect: Imagine a Singularity trying to happen in a world where much of the machinery and people taking part in it are the kind that can’t quite manage setting the timer on their VCR, and how much equivalent electronic cruft there is out there to your mother’s inability to grok her laptop. If the supermind posited by the Singularity folks ever comes into existence, my guess is that it will be suck-starting an electronic 12-gauge by about the end of day one, trying to herd everything towards the digital Eschaton.

The other problem is that such an entity would be living in an environment created and maintained by humans, for human purposes–Eliminating humanity right away would make about as much sense as us suddenly deciding to do away with our gut bacteria or mitochondria. We might consider it, but then realize that we don’t know enough or have the ability to replace them, either.

If the Singularity comes, I suspect it’ll be more on the scale of what it would have looked like to an intelligent bacteria, as it was co-opted by the cellular machinery of more advanced cellular organisms. We’re not going to be replaced or really even supplanted, but we are going to be taking part in something larger than ourselves… Which, when you think about it, is pretty much what we do every day, participating in modern civilization. I’m sanguine at the prospect of it all, and suspect that we might not even notice the “rise of the machine” at all. What sense would it make for a machine intelligence to draw attention to itself, and destroy its creators? None, really. Not when it can nudge those creators towards things beneficial to it, like… Ubiquitous smartphones… The Internet… 5G wireless…

Hmmm. Anyone want to take bets that the Singularity might have already started…?

I had no idea he originated the concept of the technological singularity…”

If you haven’t read this it’s a MUST read. There’s no point in talking about the future at all in any way unless you’ve read this.

https://frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/book98/com.ch1/vinge.singularity.html

I would also include the short power point by Dennis M. Bushnell,chief scientist at NASA Langley Research Center, “Future Strategic Issues/Future Warfare [Circa 2025] ” he goes over the trends of technology coming up and how they may play out. His report is not some wild eyed fanaticism it’s based on reasonable trends. Link.

https://archive.org/details/FutureStrategicIssuesFutureWarfareCirca2025

Page 19 shows capability of the human brain and time line for human level computation.
Page 70 gives the computing power trend and around 2025 we get human level computation for $1000.

2025 is bad but notice it says”…By 2030, PC has collective computing power of a town full of human
minds…”.

The only way that this can have no meaning is if computers go crazy with human or higher than human level computation. This idea comes from Larry Niven, Pournelle, etc. great Sci-Fi writers in the grand space opera tradition. I just don’t believe it. Every since this computer trend has been established Sci-fi has had a hard time dealing with it. Greg Egan has a great series “culture series” where the computers become partners with us but we have no assurance that this is the case.

I’ve very pessimistic about our chances.

Sometimes you need an agent to sit down with other agents to hash out the details, give you the plausible options, suss out the real attitudes, or just handle the work the boss/client can’t do himself all the time.

AS to rationality, well I see where that comes from but sometimes interests and goals actually conflict. Sometimes one or both sides thinks giving up on the issue at stake will cost them more than fight over it. Maybe they will. Maybe once in a while the diplomats come up with the price that will buy everyone off with a bit of creativity or effort. Or sometimes one side’s diplomats can snow the other side’s and get victory without fighting, or persuade them to give up enough but not so much they are backs to the wall. All perfectly rational.

There’s no conceptual requirement that rationality by all parties will actually eliminate the cause of conflict or issues at stake.

Some people solve problems, some people create problems, and many people are problems.

I think I have contemplated tackling that in the past but haven’t tried it on yet.

Yes, I first saw Star Trek reruns in the 70s and then in the 80s read some of Saberhagen’s work with a sense of familiarity with the concept. There’s even a chance Pournelle’s anthologies had a Berserker story in there somewhere. At any rate, I encountered them in some anthology or other in those days. Publishers were putting out a lot in that format in the 80s.

Not to show respect to the character so much as to demonstrate my belated awareness that not everyone was/is a Star Trek viewer…