From: hal@finney.org
Date: Mon Dec 03 2001 - 21:11:21 MST
There were a couple of good articles in the L.A. Times Opinion
section yesterday which I didn't get around to reading until today.
One was by Bart Kosko, a fuzzy theorist at USC who is familiar to many
of us. In "Your Privacy is a Disappearing Act",
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-000095718dec02.story,
he lists the various new measures which the government is using to
track people and shows how ineffective they are likely to be against
dedicated terrorists. I was a little concerned though that he talked
about anonymous remailers and cryptography as tools for terrorists which
would thwart the government's efforts; this might just lead to a crackdown
on privacy technologies.
The other was on cloning, "A Tempest in a Petri Dish", by Gregory
Stock of UCLA, who has been to some of the Extro conferences. He has a
refreshingly different perspective on the positive potential of human
cloning. After reading the NY Times article that was referenced here
yesterday about biologists being afraid to come out in public with their
pro-cloning opinions, it is good to see Stock courageously making a case
which is not heard very much these days.
BTW the article mentions that Stock has a book coming out in March 2002,
"Redesigning Humans: Our Inevitable Genetic Future". Sounds like that
should get some publicity for our views, no doubt igniting controversy
and discussion which can only be good for society.
It was great to see two articles with Extropian perspectives on the
same day.
Hal
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