From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@www.aeiveos.com)
Date: Wed Dec 01 1999 - 00:09:45 MST
There are some days when this list simply goes off the deep end.
Daniel, writes about wanting to upload octopodes, which are
either the latin plural of octopus or an acapella singing
group (according to some subset of the 149 Altavista refs).
Then Eugene, chimes in with:
> Oh, yes. Especially squids: http://www.tccorp.com/outsider/to_collect.html
>
which is a collection of wierd Halloween leftovers as far as I
can determine.
[Eugene, are you sure you haven't been testing some of your
antifreeze compounds a bit prematurely???]
What makes it more interesting, is that the store selling the
leftovers happens to be in Seattle, which as far as I can tell
from observing the television tonight has gone a little off
the deep end (7PM to dawn curfews, police & demonstrators
throwing tear gas and pepper bombs at each other, National
Guard called out, etc.) I expect more of the same tomorrow.
One has to wonder if the planners of the WTO meeting didn't
say to themselves -- OK, we know this meeting is going to
draw a lot of protesters, is there someplace we hold it
that the weather will diminish the requirement for police?
Ah yes, Seattle, in November, thats it...
Given the heavy labor protests involved against the WTO,
one thing that becomes clear is -- we better get nanotech
before we get AI, because if we get AI first, there are
going to be a lot of out-of-work people who are going to
be very unhappy. At least with nanotech first, we can tell
tell them they have to retrain as design & QA engineers.
I might go a step further and say we should probably use
biotech to get IA (intelligence augmentation) first, so "they"
can see the development path as clearly as we do and
(one would hope) develop more rational thought processes
about how to take advantage of the opportunites one may expect
instead of doing their best luddite impressions.
So, does IA before NT before AI work or does the discussion get
get sucked into another black hole?
Unless Daniel/Eugene were suggesting that uploading octapodes
would be better because 8 fingered creatures are a natural
for digital (binary) logic, so they will adapt to the upload
more easily and clearly run away with the SI.
Robert
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