From: Bostrom,N (pg) (N.Bostrom@lse.ac.uk)
Date: Mon Nov 15 1999 - 11:32:15 MST
I submitted the following letter to the editor:
Anthropocentrism without humans?
Anything that softens up people's inability to think that the future
may be very different from the present is surely a good thing. Systematic
scientific and technological progress, a mere few hundred years old, has
already changed the world in radical ways. There can be little doubt that
the human organism too will sooner or later be dramatically changed, or
rendered obsolete through artificial life forms. Yet Sterling's picture is
still much too naïve, and the posthumans he describes are unrealistically
anthropomorphic. Once there are artificial intellects that are as smart as
humans then it won't be long before they are much smarter (or at least much
faster). Even replacing parts of the human brain with some high-tech "gel"
will not get you that far if you are competing with entities whose
computational structures are not limited in that way. To avoid becoming
obsolete, you will probably have to leave the human body behind altogether,
and conceive of yourself as software that can run on any sufficiently
powerful processor.
Software can copy itself in a fraction of a second. With
reproduction so swift, computational resources (the "Lebensraum" of these
uploaded beings) soon become scarce. Evolution theory predicts that the
posthuman world will soon be dominated by life forms that have cast away all
human rudiments not contributing to reproductive success in a fitness
landscape which presumably looks very different from the environment where
Homo Sapiens evolved. It would be surprising if the outcome were anywhere
near as anthropomorphic as Stirling's article suggests.
Nick Bostrom
Dept. Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method
London School of Economics
Email: n.bostrom@lse.ac.uk <mailto:n.bostrom@lse.ac.uk>
Homepage: http://www.analytic.org <http://www.analytic.org>
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