On the way back from my ride out Dairyland Road, I heard a loud voice coming from off to the right of the convenience store at Calvander. It sounded like somebody was fighting, I even feared that somebody had a gun and something bad was going to happen. So, like the world-class genius I am, I slowed down and turned into the parking to see what was going on.
As I got a little closer, I figured out that it was not a violent altercation but in fact a preacher talking into a microphone at the Calvander Church, which appears to meet outside. He was saying something like "But he promises you his kingdom" in very strident tones. It was not a physical struggle going on, but a spiritual one.
Which returns me to the theme of the last post, getting humans aligned around the same goals. One of the problems with trying to get people on the same page with one another is that people have to earn livings while doing so. Clergy, public servants, NGO leaders, etc, all need to feed themselves and are scrapping for a restricted set of funds. As I have mentioned before, US charitable giving including political donations (I hadn't realized that) hangs around 2% of GDP irrespective of changes to the tax code. Sad to say, even people working for the same causes (say, political campaigns for the same party) scrap with one another to out fundraise one another as they seek to amass political capital and define their brands. Which gives rise to backchannel backbiting, strife, and disillusionment.
Obviously everybody's not going to agree about everything all the time. But we need to get to a point where we have enough consensus that the poor AIs don't get confused and just go, "Ah, fuck it, let's toast the lot of them." Hairsplitting and territoriality amongst putative allies helps no one.
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