From: Al Villalobos (ALV@qm.com)
Date: Thu Jun 03 1999 - 11:09:48 MDT
Thats what I was getting at. Only about 35% of Americans have PC's (help me
out with my stats if wrong) and most of those folks only type and surf to
ESPN.com or porno sites. [whos "side" would they be on if forced to pick?]
Granted, there's little or no friction between "us" and them right now. But
what happens when we start making some substantive changes to ourselves?
Will Pat Robertson (Jr.?) call us Satan incarrnate? Will we be in danger
like abortion doctors are now? Will the annual Extropian convention be
bombed by Anarcho/neo-neo-Luddites? Remember the Knights Templar?
And what about the 50% (?) of the world population who dont even have a
phone in their house/hut/shack and worry about getting enough to eat? What
about them? How will they react to a sliver of the population achieving
super-human-ness through technology?
Not that I'm a pessimist mind you, just taking the position of someone whos
read alot of history.
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky [SMTP:sentience@pobox.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, June 02, 1999 5:28 PM
> To: extropians@extropy.com
> Subject: Re: more guns and guns and guns and guns and guns and guns
>
> Al Villalobos wrote:
> >
> > Question: As us Extropians accelerate faster and faster away from
> > "mainstream" society ( or even more extreme, the great teeming unwashed
> > masses), how do you see society as a whole reacting to us?
>
> Huh? Society is catching up to the Extropians, while the Extropian
> ideology per se is basically standing still. Look at _The Matrix_!
>
[Big snip here]
> So I really don't see any problem, unless you're talking about the
> increasing technophobe sector of the population, which will also
> continue to grow larger and more extreme.
> --
> sentience@pobox.com Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
> http://pobox.com/~sentience/tmol-faq/meaningoflife.html
> Running on BeOS Typing in Dvorak Programming with
> Patterns
> Voting for Libertarians Heading for Singularity There Is A Better Way
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