From: Samantha Atkins (samantha@objectent.com)
Date: Mon Mar 11 2002 - 00:17:48 MST
nanowave wrote:
> *Chuckle* I clipped the below quote from this really crappy article on
> Stephen Hawking I stumbled across at
> http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/21414.html. Given that google has now
> cached/immortalized it, I suppose it's found it's time capsule. Poor Thomas
> C Greene in Washington. Now your children and grandchildren can access your
> pompous stupidity for all eternity. May they be entirely successful in their
> future efforts to pretend they never heard of you.
>
> "We humans invented such delicious and decidedly un-mechanical things as
> religious awareness, dance, language, visual arts and literature (and I say
> in that order). We are religious creatures; we are artistic creatures; and
> when we're exceptionally cool, we're literary creatures.
>
> No machine will be. Put this article in a time capsule and let it be read
> fifteen centuries from now. I tell my remote descendants with absolute
> confidence that they will not have built a religious, artistic, or literary
> machine. With advanced genetic engineering they may duplicate a human being,
> fine; but they will never, never ever, simulate one. It can't be done."
>
And just why do you feel confident in such blanket assertions?
We are, after all, biological machines. Do you think in 1500
years that the "machines" will only fill in the lines you are
drawing in some relatively speaking prehistoric cave? Not very
imaginative for a human.
- samantha
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