From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Thu Jan 27 2000 - 18:27:23 MST
At 08:09 PM 27/01/00 EST, Nadia wrote:
>Let's try the compassionate viewpoint.
I should, I know I should.
Om mana padma...
(seethe)
>Bigotry is caued by what? Almost all bigots share one thing.
>Fear.
>Specifically fear of the unknown, and of the strange and different...
>Fear of AI is. IMHO, a fairly rational response,
Yep, I can dig it. And I acknowledge that my public approach on this stuff
is pretty full-on, gung-ho, not necessarily pie in the AI when we don't
die, but with that tendency.
My sympathies are in some measure with the tedious creature, since the
worst impulses of this century (and maybe every century) have been the
demonising and dehumanising of other humans by those temporarily on top, or
wishing to be on top. I was a foe of behaviorism back in the early 1960s
when it was hegemonic in psychology. Uploading creeps me out too (child of
my time).
For all that, I was baffled by the problem of how to speak to this person.
I tried iterated calm reason, and of course kept sliding into sarcasm
(always a fine method for calming down a hissy fit, not).
Ho de hum. Another journalist and photographer here for an interview in an
hour - must try not to blow his fuses.
Damien
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 15:26:30 MST