From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Sun Dec 24 2000 - 16:25:58 MST
"J. R. Molloy" wrote:
>
> I think one becomes a little less sane while seriously
> considering destroying the human race in a mass extinction event called
> Mutually Assured Destruction.
Sorry. I still have to disagree with this. If Earth gets wiped out by
grey goo, and I and four other people are left floating in orbit among the
smoking remains, with no computing equipment and only a month worth of
food, so that the human species is gone, and the Singularity is gone, and
there is absolutely nothing I can do about any of it, then I would
immediately shift my underlying philosophy away from the Singularity, and
even shift away from the altruism that is currently a consequence of being
one person on a planet of six billion, so that I would still be a nice,
positive-sum person, but weighted towards stewardship of the 20% of
humanity's happiness that was my own personal domain, and I would thus go
about continuing to create happiness and minimize pain, albeit on a
smaller scale, until such time as the food ran out.
That's sanity.
-- -- -- -- --
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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