From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Sat Oct 13 2001 - 21:58:08 MDT
First of all, let's get one thing completely straight. The term
"transhuman" is sometimes used as if it meant "transhumanist", which I
object to, but is nonetheless an existing usage. The term "posthuman" is
absolutely reserved for genuine posthuman entities. You can be a
posthumanist, but not a posthuman.
With that out of the way, your strategies are still messed up. They
require far too many people to function. A research project may require
serious funding and serious people, but at least it doesn't require a
majority of an entire country's population. Strategies that require a
majority of a population to participate have been known to succeed. The
American Revolution succeeded. Martin Luther King succeeded. But
anything on that massive a scale takes billions of dollars, a core group
of activists willing to devote their entire lives to the problem, and even
then it still takes a generation to set up the initial conditions if they
haven't been set up already.
You don't have that kind of time, and furthermore you're treating this
whole issue like a contest for the position of tribal chief. The
objective here is not to take over the existing tribe or go split off your
own. This is about technology. If you're still interested in seceeding,
I suggest you go read "How To Start Your Own Country" so that you can
become discouraged enough to give up.
Maybe I'm being too harsh here. I guess a lot of these ideas look a lot
less silly if you're planning for a 50-year or, ha ha, 100-year outlook.
But try pretending, as a mental exercise, that everything you do with your
life has to be completely finished by 2008 to do any good, and see what
that does to your perspective.
-- -- -- -- --
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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