Re: question: receiving messages from powers

From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Wed Nov 03 1999 - 11:43:03 MST


This one is easy. Right now, attack is easier than defense; you can't
stop a massed nuclear attack. Given nanotechnology, the inequality will
get even worse. But in software, it seems to me that it's getting
easier to defend then attack, and I certainly don't see Powers worrying
about Trojan-horse attacks and the like. And it could be that under the
ultimate laws of physics, defense is just easier than attack; once you
have total control over local space, no external force can take it away
from you.

Leaving aside answers like "social contracts" and "convergent motivations".

-- 
           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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