Many thanks, Vaniver. Now I get it, and I really like it because "suffering" rings badly whereas s-risks seems like a more manageable concept to work with.
I agree that the problem of the alignment of human values with artificial intelligence values is in practice unsolvable. Except in a very particular case, that is when the artificial intelligence and the human are the same thing. That is, to stop developing AI on dry hardware and just develop it in wet brains, for what Elon Musk's Neuralink approach could be a step in the right direction.
Rafael, many thanks for your answer. I like how you conceptualize the matter but I fight for understand the very last part of your comment. If we have a multidimensional space where the axes represent (let's say, for clarity, positive and negative values of) how certain values are satisfied, how is it possible that most places in space are indifferent?
In other contexts (for example, when talking about euthanasia), "dying with dignity" is simply equivalent to dying without great suffering. This is, it seems to me, because dying has a high correlation with suffering intensely, and with enough suffering, identity (or rather, the illusion of identity) is destroyed, since with enough suffering, anyone would betray their ideas, their family, their country, their ethics, etc. trying anything to relieve it, even if it doesn't help. With enough suffering nothing remains recognizable, either physically or mentally, of what one was before. The article deals with a concept of dignity related to honesty and mental models, which is somehow compatible with this idea ("...figuring out what is true, and by allowing no other considerations than that to enter; that's dignity").
I'm surprised that in a post about dying with dignity and its comments, the word suffer / suffering is found zero times. Can someone explain it?
Its interesting to note that only mammals have neocortex [1] and birds for instance don't even have cortex [2]. But since birds have sensory perception, cognition and language, and some of them are also very smart [3] [4] [5], it seems that, either sensory perception, cognition, and language are processed also (even mainly) in other parts of the brain, either birds and other animal species have structures equivalent to the cortex and neocortex and we should stop saying that "only mammals have neocortex" [6].
In the meantime, it sounds less wrong, instead of saying "The neocortex is *the* part of the human brain *responsible* for higher-order functions like sensory perception, cognition, and language...", to say "The neocortex is *a* part of the human brain that *plays a relevant role* in higher-order functions like sensory perception, cognition, and language...". This is because, if we combine the widely accepted idea that "only mammals have neocortex" with the expression "neocortex is the part of the brain responsible for higher-order functions", it seems to indicate that individuals without neocortex do not have higher-order functions, which is false, and we would be, perhaps inadvertently, promoting discrimination of non-human animals without neocortex, such as birds or fish.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neocortex
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/science/neurophilosophy/2016/jun/15/birds-pack-more-cells-into-their-brains-than-mammals
[3] https://www.gizhub.com/crows-smarter-apes-language
[4] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20191211-crows-could-be-the-smartest-animal-other-than-primates
[5] http://m.nautil.us/blog/why-neuroscientists-need-to-study-the-crow
[6] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/10/121001151953.htm
I have my own ranking of types of evidence, from most to least scientific, where "scientific" means "good", starting with induction (repeated observations, replicated experiments), logical deductions, interpolation, authority... and ending with popularity, intuition, superstition, dreams, faith... So, as long as some of these "evidences" can be found, instead of saying "there is no evidence" I say "there is little evidence" and avoid misconnotation while being precise with the denotation. No irony