It is my view that we are all apes. And therefore all sadists, all maschoists, all vengeful and envious and jealous and have all of the primal things living social animals need to survive in the hash environments of nature. We all displace aggression, we are all hedonists and much else besides. The sweetest person you know has to displace aggression somewhere, or otherwise, has none -- and would then quickly fall victim to the aggression of others on one day of bad luck.

There are those who live lives where this can be tamed/sublimated in a mostly socially acceptable manner, with the socially unacceptable elements "hidden from view" and not too dangerous or harmful. And there are those, unfortunate perhaps, that find themselves (suddenly) unconstrained by their social environment or suddenly imbued with sufficient power to do as they wish. Not many survive such freedom or power, morally in tact, because morality doesnt properly belong to that domain.

The story of Oscar Wilde captures this doubleness to our nature -- split by the socially acceptable. He lived a life of relatively unconstrained freedom in private, perfectly constructing a socially acceptable veneer to his "entanglements" with young boys and the like. Until one environment this pretence could not survive: a court room.

You could see the lesson of Oscar Wilde as about the hypocrisy of people. Or, if you want to remain a (post-cynical) optimist, about the need to keep people like Wilde out of court rooms so that their public image serves as a role model of sorts.

Role models are just those people who never find themselves in court. And this is not necessarily a bad thing. Young children are apes too, and all a role model can be is a shaming mechanism to civilise what they will, eventually, hide from social view -- tame it and make it, ideally not too dangerous or harmful. Perhaps say, only a thoughtless bullying, only a trivial kind of stealing, only revenge on someone who might at least deserve it. But who knows.

None of our species, at least, can become a role model for real. This would induce such a drastic split in the psyche with a tremdenous shameful repression of our real nature; and any real attempt creates profoundly unself-aware monsters. All role models can be is an attempt to ameliorate. An impossible standard that internalises a mild helpful sort of shame

>Sometimes when I find someone to look up to and admire, I later find out there is potentially some dark reality to them

I too feel exactly what you are saying. I also think that a lot of good role models are simply often among less visible people, sometimes less ambitious. I am not assuming any hard correlation between the two, though. And we also need to accept that we are all only humans, not infallible. Values are more important than singular acts (within reasonable acceptance limits of course).

Anyway. I strongly recommend reading what Bill Gates has to say about AI. I can be wrong, but based on your comment it seems to me that you may find it interesting.

> but if you want to stop a boulder rolling down hill, what can you do besides run ahead of it and try stop it?

Maybe the first thing to do is to stop making the boulder bigger?

> if you want to stop a boulder rolling down hill, what can you do besides run ahead of it and try stop it?

Bomb it, obviously.