So we can imagine AI occupying the most "cushy" subset of former human territory
We can definitely imagine it - this is a salience argument - but why is it at all likely? Also, this argument is subject to reference class tennis: humans have colonized much more and more diverse territory than other apes, or even all other primates.
Once AI can flourish without ongoing human support (building and running machines, generating electricity, reacting to novel environmental challenges), what would plausibly limit AI to human territory, let alone "cushy" human territory? Computers and robots can survive in any environment humans can, and in some where we at present can't.
Also: the main determinant of human territory is inter-human social dynamics. We are far from colonizing everywhere our technology allows, or (relatedly) breeding to the greatest number we can sustain. We don't know what the main determinant of AI expansion will be; we don't even know yet how many different and/or separate AI entities there are likely to be, and how they will cooperate, trade or conflict with each other.
Nuclear power has the highest chance of The People suddenly demanding it be turned off twenty years later for no good reason. Baseload shouldn't be hostage to popular whim.
Thanks for pointing this out!
A few corollaries and alternative conclusions to the same premises:
Thanks! This, together with gjm's comment, is very informative.
How is the base or fundamental frequency chosen? What is special about the standard ones?
the sinking of the Muscovy
Is this some complicated socio-political ploy denying the name Moskva / Moscow and going back to the medieval state of Muscovy?
I'm a moral anti-realist; it seems to me to be a direct inescapable consequence of materialism.
I tried looking at definitions of moral relativism, and it seems more confused than moral realism vs. anti-realism. (To be sure there are even more confused stances out there, like error theory...)
Should I take it that Peterson and Harris are both moral realists and interpret their words in that light? Note that this wouldn't be reasoning about what they're saying, for me, it would be literally interpreting their words, because people are rarely precise, and moral realists and anti-realists often use the same words to mean different things. (In part because they're confused and are arguing over the "true" meaning of words.)
So, if they're moral realists, then "not throwing away the concept of good" means not throwing away moral realism; I think I understand what that means in this context.
When Peterson argues religion is a useful cultural memeplex, he is presumably arguing for all of (Western monotheistic) religion. This includes a great variety of beliefs, rituals, practices over space and time - I don't think any of these have really stayed constant across the major branches of Judaism, Christianity and Islam over the last two thousand years. If we discard all these incidental, mutable characteristics, what is left as "religion"?
One possible answer (I have no idea if Peterson would agree): the structure of having shared community beliefs and rituals remains, but not the specific beliefs, or the specific (claimed) reasons for holding them; the distinctions of sacred vs. profane remains, and of priests vs. laymen, and of religious law vs. freedom of actions in other areas, but no specifics of what is sacred or what priests do; the idea of a single, omniscient, omnipotent God, but not that God's attributes, other than being male; that God judges and rewards or punishes people, but no particulars of what is punished or rewarded, or what punishments or rewards might be.
ETA: it occurs to me that marriage-as-a-sacrament, patriarchy, and autocracy, have all been stable common features of these religions. I'm not sure if they should count as features of the religion, or of a bigger cultural package which has conserved these and other features.
Atheists reject the second part of the package, the one that's about a God. But they (like everyone) still have the first part: shared beliefs and rituals and heresies, shared morals and ethics, sources of authority, etc. (As an example, people sometimes say that "Science" often functions as a religion for non-scientists; I think that's what's meant; Science-the-religion has priests and rituals and dogmas and is entangled with law and government, but it has no God and doesn't really judge people.)
But that's just what I generated when faced with this prompt. What does Peterson think is the common basis of "Western religion over the last two thousand years" that functions as a memeplex and ignores the incidentals that accrue like specific religious beliefs?
They are both pro free speech and pro good where "good" is what a reasonable person would think of as "good".
I have trouble parsing that definition. You're defining "good" by pointing at "reasonable". But people who disagree on what is good, will not think each other reasonable.
I have no idea what actual object-level concept of "good" you meant. Can you please clarify?
For example, you go on to say:
They both agree that religion has value.
I'm not sure whether religion has (significant, positive) value. Does that make me unreasonable?
What is giant power? I can't figure this out.