From: Phil Osborn (philosborn2001@yahoo.com)
Date: Sun Aug 25 2002 - 16:35:03 MDT
Responding to Spike and his elimination of history in
favor of futurism.
Sometimes I find myself imagining this little
nightmare: God, in the form of some minor bureacrat
who is maximizing his job-enjoyment utility by
introducing elements of sadistic humor, is training
virtual minds for various boring or painful jobs. So,
he puts you into a sim, tweaks it until it hurts and
waits for you to rebel, at which point you get slammed
and the memory of the pain and the connection is
stored in a neural net, while the details are erased.
Then he restarts the sim, until, after ten million
trials, the neural net is totally reliable - the
perfect slave.
I'd like to keep history, thank-you, but I think that
to avoid the problems you suggest, that
Spielberg(sp?)'s Holocaust memory project is a good
example. Today, all we can effectively do in most
cases is take down people's life experiences before
they die. That's fine. If we can get enough of this
personal perspective data, then a few years or decades
from now, we'll have the capacity to cross-correlate
it all and build a simulated history-world that will
be very hard to fake.
So, as I've suggested here before, if you know anyone
who is elderly, please encourage them to record some
memiors. The medium is not that important. If they
can put it on audio tape or video (which is actually
cheaper per minute, amazingly), then eventually it can
all be dumped into the world memory. Having
independently held hard copy is actually an advantage
for verification purposes as opposed to going directly
to some central repository on the web or whereever.
A lot of the conflicts are inherently unresolvable
within the models for resolution that we currently
employ. If you assume that there is some one rightful
owner of a piece of land which has passed through
multiple warring party's hands, then you might as well
give up right then. It may be utterly impossible to
establish who the "true" rightful owner is. At this
point our system breaks down, and you find situations
like in Zimbabwe or the restitution movement now in
the U.S.
A better approach from the standpoint of pure justice
may be to assess relative damages and contributions -
Value Added or Subtracted. Various parties may be
seen as owning shares in a disputed property. This
may well go far beyond the capacities of our present
legal system to handle, however, which is a problem.
This problem may be solved ultimately by the same data
handling capacities as the history-world involves, and
using much of the same data-base, as well.
However, your emphasis on teaching futurism itself is
well taken.
__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Finance - Get real-time stock quotes
http://finance.yahoo.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 09:16:25 MST