From: Samantha Atkins (samantha@objectent.com)
Date: Mon Nov 26 2001 - 19:52:48 MST
Mark Walker wrote:
>
> There are two big families of argument here, at least as I see it.
> (1)'Moratoriumists' believe that we do not have the wisdom at our current
> stage of cultural development to use Person Engineering Technologies (PETs),
> but leave open the possibility that in the longer-term this might be
> ethically ok.
I have some amount of sympathy for this position. The amount of
wisdom we humans apply to any level of technology today is not
at all impressive. But I would rather see the technologies
develop, including ones that might be helpful in getting more
intellectual capable humans (and other sentient beings) than
wait some indefinite period of time at the current levels and
capabilities - even if this was remotely possible. Personally I
don't think more raw intelligence and computational power alone
will be sufficient to arrive at wisdom but that is a different
question. The other arguing point against this position is to
attempt to pin down exactly how these technologies might be
misued. I can't come up with any very compelling scare cases at
the moment.
- samantha
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