From: Peter C. McCluskey (pcm@rahul.net)
Date: Fri Jul 27 2001 - 12:04:37 MDT
lcorbin@tsoft.com (Lee Corbin) writes:
>With the Singularity so close, why would you tell someone to save
>money, work hard (even when they don't feel like it), and educate
>themselves (even when they don't want to)? I'll bet that you have
>reasons! But they can retort "now there is a GMI---so I don't
>*have* to do any of those things, right?"
Why would anyone be satisfied with whatever it is that the GMI guarantees?
It's unlikely that it would guarantee them enough wealth to upload or to
augment their minds or to migrate to an asteroid that is safe from gray goo.
It might not even guarantee them enough to afford cryonics. It's easy to
imagine that in a few years a new cryopreservation method will be offered
at higher than current prices which has been shown to work on small animals.
I could probably come up with many more possibilities along these lines.
I can easily imagine that the importance of being one of first to upload or
to colonize a new solar system exceeds any historical benefits that have
resulted from wealth, and that people who don't augment their minds will
become anachronisms.
These examples also show why extremely few of the people who advocate
a GMI will be satisfied with just guaranteeing that nobody starves, and
why your hope that the singularity will make a GMI easier to afford seems
a bit utopian. There has never been any threshold of wealth beyond which
a person's life expectancy doesn't appear to increase with further wealth,
and it isn't obvious how the singularity will change this. The sympathies
for the poor that cause people to want a GMI will cause them to keep
increasing the number of needs that it ought to cover until it reaches
whatever limits taxpayers will tolerate.
-- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Peter McCluskey | Fed up with democracy's problems? Examine Futarchy: http://www.rahul.net/pcm | http://hanson.gmu.edu/futarchy.pdf or .ps
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