From extropians-request@extropy.org Wed Dec 15 00:52:12 1993 Return-Path: Received: from usc.edu by chaph.usc.edu (4.1/SMI-4.1+ucs-3.0) id AA18779; Wed, 15 Dec 93 00:52:10 PST Errors-To: Extropians-Request@gnu.ai.mit.edu Received: from news.panix.com by usc.edu (4.1/SMI-3.0DEV3-USC+3.1) id AA00436; Wed, 15 Dec 93 00:52:06 PST Errors-To: Extropians-Request@gnu.ai.mit.edu Received: by news.panix.com id AA16128 (5.65c/IDA-1.4.4 for more@usc.edu); Wed, 15 Dec 1993 03:45:36 -0500 Date: Wed, 15 Dec 1993 03:45:36 -0500 Message-Id: <199312150845.AA16128@news.panix.com> To: Extropians@extropy.org From: Extropians@extropy.org Subject: Extropians Digest X-Extropian-Date: December 15, 373 P.N.O. [08:45:15 UTC] Reply-To: extropians@extropy.org Errors-To: Extropians-Request@gnu.ai.mit.edu Status: RO Extropians Digest Wed, 15 Dec 93 Volume 93 : Issue 348 Today's Topics: [2 msgs] Baby Killing Assault Rifles - Glock 17 [1 msgs] Brave New Extropia? , Extropian children [1 msgs] Brave New Extropia? No Thanks. [1 msgs] Current Gun Laws [2 msgs] Human Language (was The Importance of Reading) [1 msgs] NRA [1 msgs] Reverse Polish Moon Treaty [5 msgs] VVLS: Extropian story from Village Voice Literary Supplement [1 msgs] VVLS: Extropians in Village Voice Literary Supplement [1 msgs] Women Questioning My Ironic Comments [1 msgs] of Newtons and Nintendoes [2 msgs] Administrivia: No admin msg. Approximate Size: 52201 bytes. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 14 Dec 1993 15:27:36 -0800 From: dkrieger@netcom.com (Dave Krieger) Subject: NRA At 4:01 PM 12/14/93 -0600, Craig Presson wrote: >Since Wayne LaPierre came back as Exec VP, the NRA has adopted a much >more aggressive pro-2nd stance. I recommend that everyone who cares >about such things should join the NRA, as the membership count of NRA >means something on the Hill. It's 3.2E6 and growing. I sent in a check for a 3-year membership this week. To quote Wilford Brimley, "It's the right thing to do." :-) dV/dt ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 14 Dec 1993 15:07:35 -0800 From: plaz@netcom.com (Geoff Dale) Subject: of Newtons and Nintendoes >Say, does anybody make a PCMCIA card for the Newt to make it a >"universal" IR remote-control? Could download TV guide right >into it, mark desired programs for recording, and so on.... >keep videotape library database right on the Newt, do general >home control... > >derek Actually, I've heard rumour of a project to do this without a card. The hardware is already adequate for this purpose. _______________________________________________________________________ Geoff Dale -- insert standard disclaimers here -- Plastic Beethoven plaz@netcom.com ExI-Freegate Virtual Branch Head plaz@io.com 66 Pyramid Plaza Cypherpunk/Extropian Freegate, Metaverse@io.com 7777 "Once you've gone plastic, you can never go back." ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 14 Dec 1993 15:39:00 -0800 From: dkrieger@netcom.com (Dave Krieger) Subject: Reverse Polish Moon Treaty At 3:04 PM 12/14/93 -0800, Robin Hanson wrote: >Dave Krieger writes: > > "Unless nanotech comes about as the exclusive product of one or at most a > handful of individuals, it seems very unlikely to me that some elite will > end up owning everything. (Even though my novel _Tin Gods and Carbon > Angels_ is based on just that premise.) If you're really worried, you > should be agitating in favor of the Reverse Polish Moon Treaty." > > >The "Reverse Polish Moon Treaty" seems to me an odd focus of efforts to >avoid poverty. As I understand it, the proposal is to give everyone >alive on some date equal shares in mutual funds which own parts of the >moon, and then to forbid folks to sell their shares for several decades. >This is as an alternative to accepting folks homesteading the moon. Your information is confused. The RPMT was described by Mark Miller in the Extropy interview I did with him. There would be no restrictions on selling shares, and it would apply to the whole universe, not just the moon (with property rights and noncoercion enforced by nanobotic "blue goo"). In any case, I was making fun of Jay's fears of "galactic sharecropperdom", not seriously proposing agitation in favor of the RPMT. The point is moot, at least until we get closer to having molecular manufacturing, because the system requires blue goo to work (and thus only looks feasible to those who expect nanotech). dV/dt ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 15 Dec 93 00:20:47 GMT From: price@price.demon.co.uk (Michael Clive Price) Subject: Women Questioning My Ironic Comments Tim May: > Perhaps both Kennita and Nancy are unaware of my scrupulous avoidance > of those stupid "smileys" computer geeks so often use. Which why you are so often misunderstood and get drawn into ridiculous flamewars. Mike Price price@price.demon.co.uk ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 14 Dec 1993 20:05:52 -0500 From: price@price.demon.co.uk Subject: ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 15 Dec 93 01:00:21 GMT From: Michael Clive Price Subject: Brave New Extropia? No Thanks. Amara says: > One of the most distressing things that happened when I finished > school with my M.S. Physics degree a couple of years ago was realizing > that I can do the mechanics of physics problems just fine, but I've > never grasped the fundamentals enough to develop a working intuition > in formulating a problem. This distressed me too. With the wisdom of age I have come to suspect that *most* physics students graduate with a poor understanding of fundamental concepts. My intuition (beyond classical phyiscs) has largely developed after graduation. Mike Price price@price.demon.co.uk ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 15 Dec 93 01:08:42 GMT From: price@price.demon.co.uk (Michael Clive Price) Subject: Brave New Extropia? , Extropian children David ? writes: > I believe that postpartum depression results from certain misguided > birthing practices and not the experience of birth itself. More likely due to hormonal changes as the body reverts back to pre- pregnancy equilibrium. Pregnancy releases endorphins giving a months- long high. Afterwards.... Mike Price price@price.demon.co.uk ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 14 Dec 1993 20:49:24 -0500 From: price@price.demon.co.uk Subject: ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 14 Dec 1993 17:23:13 -0800 From: dkrieger@netcom.com (Dave Krieger) Subject: VVLS: Extropians in Village Voice Literary Supplement Probably (C) 1993 the Village Voice. Look up "Fair Use" in "Nimmer on Copyright" and get off my back. (on the cover): Download {sic} Your Brain by Julian Dibbell (Table of Contents): We Come in Peace (Page 28)... For those about to evolve, we salute you: Julian Dibbell greets the citizens of Extropia. Terminal Identities Extropians Boot Up By Julian Dibbell The millenium wasn't supposed to go out like this. From the first scholasticist baby-steps toward enlightenment through high capitalism's exuberant feats of industrial light and magic, it's been a thousand-year drama starring the secular-humanist triumph over ancient deferences to the natural and the supernatural. By all narrative rights the show should be wrapping up about now with a nice millenarian advent of boundless prosperity driven by sheer human cleverness. Instead, the humanist model of progress slouches toward the year 2000 harassed by grim omens of its limitations: a plague whose indomitability mocks technoscience's pretenses to omnipotence, a hole in the ozone that flashes a stop sign at humanity's restless transformation of its environment, and a fallen empire that squabbles lethally over the wreckage of scientific socialism's dreams of paradise on earth. While religious fundamentalists, crystal-gazers, and certain stripes of post-modern theory-head tank up on fin-de-millennium euphoria, partisans of the millenium's defining cultural current may just have to sit this rapture out. But not if the emergent intellectual subculture of radical humanist technophiles who call themselves Extropians has anything to say about it--and the thing is, they do have plenty to say. In the virtual pages of an Internet mailing list averaging some 40 messages a day (many of which verge on essay-length), and in the hard zine copy of the biannual Extropy: The Journal of Trans-humanist Thought, the movement's combustible mix of fringe academics, over-educated computer programmers, and renegade philosophers is busy hammering out the details of a rigorously secular millennium-to-come whose cosmic sweep rivals anything in Revelation. Nor have the Extropians allowed themselves to be outclassed in their choice of media by the Judeo-Christian people of the book. In addition to their desktop discourse, they further encode their worldview in an evolving roster of non- and science-fiction tomes deemed officially Extropian-friendly. Bounding from the elegant science of Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers's classic exposition of complexity theory, Order out of Chaos: Man's New Dialogue With Nature (Bantam, $12.50 paper), to the Joycean ejaculations of Robert Anton Wilson's postpsychedelic inner guidebook Prometheus Rising (New Falcon Publications, $12.95 paper), the Extropian canon clears quantum cosmology, Darwinian economics, and cutting-edge artificial intelligence theory in the leap. Underlying this eclectic syllabus, however, is a simple eschatological guarantee: that almost any attribute ever associated with godhead--immortality, coextension with the universe, omnipotent intelligence--will some day be attained by humans through steady application of the same cleverness that's given us stock exchanges, cable television, and programmable toaster ovens. Never mind entropy's insistence that, sooner or later, everything put together falls apart. True to their name, the Extropians are having none of it, wagering instead that the gradual accumulation of biocultural order and information known as evolution is an equally insistent trend, certain to overcome in the long run whatever barriers the universe may put in its way. "No mysteries are sacrosanct," writes Extropy editor-in-chief Max More in one of his periodic manifestos, "no limits unquestionable; the unknown will yield to the ingenious mind." Such blunt optimism doesn't exactly blend in with the entropic scenery of the present historical landscape, but neither is it entirely out of sync with the culture at large. In particular, the Extropians' technofuturist rhetoric resonates like crazy with the public discourse currently buzzing around computers, whose reliably meteoric annual increases in power have roped off an area in which it's safe to speculate cheerfully about the shape of things to come. But where the technology-page pundits stick to relatively parochial prophecies of information super-highways and virtual shopping malls, Extropian thought hijacks the predictable arc of computing's future and makes it promise transcendence. Most Extropians foresee a moment not too far from now when computational muscle will get brawny enough to cheaply record and operate human minds, simulated in all their neuronal (and neurotic) complexity. Sketched out with informed precision in the canonical Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence (Harvard, $22.95; $8.95 paper), by tenured mad scientist and sometime Extropy contributor Hans Moravec, this particular prophecy culminates in a materialist transmigration of souls. "Uploaded" into software form, our minds will be liberated from their mortal bodies, free to inhabit in perpetuity whatever cyborg shapes become available. Our thoughts running at lightning speed, our identities recombining promiscuously with advanced artificial intelligences, we will have become, as Extropian taxonomy has it, posthumans. In the posthuman phase of this future history, our new robot frames will take on stupefying diversity and power as the miniaturization of info-tech is supplemented by the wundertools of nanotechnology. Dreamed up by physicist K. Eric Drexler, whose Engines of Creation (Anchor, $10.95 paper) rides high on the Extropian reading list, nanotech is a speculative but theoretically quite feasible science of molecular-scale machinery, promising absurdly vast increases in our manufacturing skills. For Extropians, that promise is our ticket off the planet and out to the far reaches of the universe. Colonizing space in great swarm-like and increasingly dense populations of superintelligent nanobots, we will in the end fill every nook and cranny of the cosmos, enlisting every last electron in the task of embodying our ceaselessly expansive, disembodied minds. Moravec's sketch of this Extropian Omega Point combines the ecologist's worst conceivable nightmare of environmental exploitation with the mystic's most lucid dream of oneness with the universe, expressing them both with an engineer's detachment: "The final frontier will be urbanized, ultimately, into an arena where every bit of activity is a meaningful computation: ... [the] universe will be transformed into a cyberspace." This terminal macadamization of the cosmic wilderness lies eons distant, of course, but we won't have to wait nearly that long to witness the Extropian millennium's commencement. The precise kick-off moment is referred to in Extropian lore as "the Singularity"--"a time in the future," writes More, "when everything will be so radically different from today, and changing so fast, that we cannot accurately foresee life beyond that horizon." Movement nanotechies expect the Singularity to arrive with decisive drama (in their messages to the mailing list they like to speculate about the drastic historical changes that will have transpired by the end of the day on which nanotech is perfected) and soon, possibly as early as the next century's first quarter. Despite the prophetic pitch of their pronouncements, Extropians remain die-hard rationalists, resistant to revealed truth of any kind, even if it's the truth of their own predictions. Indeed, smug acceptance of the imminence of technosalvation has become a semi-official Extro no-no, lampooned in a recent list message that diagnosed "Awaiting the Singularity" as one of the "Seven Warning Signs" of a new nervous disorder dubbed "Rapture of the Future." And not even the most incurable sufferers of the malady can hope to sit back and wait quiescently for the Extropian future to come and get them. At the very least, belief in that future demands an investment of time and money in securing one's own postmortem cryonic suspension, just in case the technologies of immortality don't arrive this lifetime. In addition, as a way of getting acclimated to the furious pace of change awaiting anyone who lives long enough to shoot the singularity's rapids, Max More prescribes a vigorous regimen of self-transformation by any means necessary: drugs both smart and recreational, on-line computer identiy play, nontraditional living arrangements, positive-thinking visualization techniques (as seen in Tony Robbins info-mercials!), and even name changes (Max O'Connor became Max More, punningly advertising his philosophy of boundless expansion). But if anything focuses the Extropian mind on the here and now, it's the hard core of politics at the movement's center. That those politics are thoroughly libertarian should surprise no one familar with subcultures rooted in either computers or the sci fi that Extropian thought so snugly borders. Still, the Extropians' is a libertarianism (or anarcho-capitalism, as some of them prefer) of rare sophistication, grounded in more than just the usual teenage overdose of Robert A. Heinlein. Not that they deny his enduring influence, of course--the immortalist fantasies Methuselah's children (Baen Books, $3.50 paper) and Time Enough for Love (Ace, $5.99 paper) are official Extropian classics--or that of the deathlessly yucky Ayn Rand, whose "novel" Atlas Shrugged (Signet, $6.99 paper) also makes the list. Yet even when the mailing list starts to clog up with anti-gun control tractlets, the Extropians' antiauthoritarian impulse seems most of all to flow from deep within the logic of the systems upon which their long-term optimism rests. In the workings of evolution, of mind, and even of the computer networks over which the Extropians conduct most of their discourse, the hallmark seems to be an elegant collective dance of undirected individual agents acting in their own self-interest. It's what complexity theory calls self-organization, Max More calls Spontaneous Order, and most Extropians call anarchy or, simply, freedom. If you want to call it a hopelessly naive prescription for the global and social problems of the 20th century's closing years, be my guest. The moment we live in is, after all, one in which the mortal body is still very much with us. It's a moment in which no amount of reasoned optimism can quite dispel the threat of civilization-crushing environmental diasaster. And it's a moment in which, therefore, Extropianism's laissez-faire heedlessness of those bodies' and this earth's pressing claims borders on reckless endangerment of the species--or would, if the movement's influence on mainstream thought loomed any larger than, say, the Spartacus Youth League's. But before you assign the Extropians to your list of merely interesting wingnuts, remember this: we humans have been around for thousands of millenia now, and if we make it out of this one alive, we could face many thousands more, or even an eternity of them. The millenarian long view, in other words, is not one we should abandon lightly. And while it may strike you as either a sick joke or a clever one that the only going heirs to Karl Marx's late great secular humanist millenarianism are a quasi-crackpot band of radical free marketeers, it's no joke at all that the quasi-crackpots' vision could turn out to be our best guide through the strage eons to follow. Should intellectual hsitory repeat itself and Extropianism get the same shot at shaping human destiny that Marxism did, let's hope this time around it's not as tragedy but as the epic space opera we surely have in us. ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 14 Dec 1993 18:00:22 -0800 (PST) From: tcmay@netcom.com (Timothy C. May) Subject: of Newtons and Nintendoes Derek Zahn writes: > Say, does anybody make a PCMCIA card for the Newt to make it a > "universal" IR remote-control? Could download TV guide right > into it, mark desired programs for recording, and so on.... > keep videotape library database right on the Newt, do general > home control... The basic Newton already has all the hardware to do this, via the IR beaming port on the top. I've heard several comments about such a remote, and I know folks have cajoled the H-P 48sx calculator to do such a thing, so the Newton should be comparatively easy. Getting the channel info is not easy, though. But I expect relatively few users will leave their Newtons laying around to program their VCRs while they're gone, especially since dedicated units to do this are avialable already (cheaply, too). These "VCR+" units, and variants, use printed program codes to handle the selection. I don't think they are accessible to general users. (And their are some encryption issues, discsussed periodically in sci.crypt.) --Tim May -- .......................................................................... Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@netcom.com | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero 408-688-5409 | knowledge, reputations, information markets, W.A.S.T.E.: Aptos, CA | black markets, collapse of governments. Higher Power: 2^756839 | Public Key: PGP and MailSafe available. Note: I put time and money into writing this posting. I hope you enjoy it. ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 14 Dec 1993 18:15:59 -0800 (PST) From: Oliver Seiler Subject: Current Gun Laws On Tue, 14 Dec 1993, Timothy C. May wrote: > Oliver Seiler marks himself for "further investigation" by asking: Oh, didn't I mention, this is all for an article I'm writing... Speculative stuff... all of it... same with all my postings when we had the drug thread. I don't do drugs... I don't do anything illegal... I don't even go outside. I try not to breath much as well, I might deprive my neighbours... > I don't know what laws Washington state has. Up until a few years ago, I > could buy nearly anything I wanted at the local gun shows in > California...no muss, no fuss, no paperwork. Now, even transferring a gun > as a gift or a loan (for more than some number of days) counts as a > transfer and invokes the full regimen of forms, fees, and delays. > > If not Washington, you might try driving over to Idaho, as I suspect they > are still a gun-respecting state. And I know some folks in the Coure > d'Alene (I've butchered the spelling) area who probably have some guns to > sell. > > >Practice would be my other big concern. Maybe hike up into the mountains > >and set up my own target shoot... (In a society where guns are seen as evil > >by the majority, I don't think advertising it widely is a good tactic...) > > Could be dangerous, as the sound of gunshots could bring the RCMP down on > your tail. And of course getting your gun into Canada could be quite risky. Perhaps. The RCMP tend to stick to the doughnut shops. I'd relate some of the humourous run-ins with the RCMP in doughnut shops, but I'll stick to what's relevant... > >Deciding whether the war on crime will be more expensive than the war on > >(some) drug... Ten years from now I wonder if the government will be as > >nice as they are now... > > > Well, in this country the government is not very nice at all. When the BATF > decides you need killin,' they just go ahead and kill you. They call it a > raid on a "dangerous and crazed Extropians, with his home filled with > illegal cryptographic materials and atheistic magazines." Don't recognize my ironic comment? Ah well, maybe I should have used a smiley. > More street crime = more paranoia by the public = more anti-gun hysteria = > a disarmed population = more cops with bigger budgets = more things > declared illegal = more raids on homes = an end to basic Constitutional > rights (this never applied in Canada, of course) = storm troopers = a > kinder and gentler fascist state. > Hey, we are one step closer... At least you already have a large stockpile of guns... The only pleasant thing I can think of is that I know what the Canadian Army is like... Not much worry there. My primary concern is that, given a deterioration in the states, Canada will be under pressure to allow US law enforcement agencies to have wider scope... On a side note, how hard is it to manufacture a gun? A recent post commented on given the power of desktop computer controlled milling machinery, privately produced custom arms aren't much further. How hard would it be to set up a clandestine gun manufacturing lab (hey, maybe I can write a book for Loompanics...) -Oliver ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 15 Dec 1993 09:44:26 +0900 (JST) From: mgix@jpn.thomson-di.fr (Emmanuel Mogenet) Subject: Human Language (was The Importance of Reading) Elizabeth Schwartz writes: >The first human writings were pictorial, more like diagrams. A picture of >a bear and a cave, a picture of deer running and arrows, etc. > > It took quite a few levels of abstraction to get to today's phonetic >alphabets. People had to invent the use of written symbols to express >abstract nouns and verbs (they also had to have abstract nouns and verbs, >come to think of it.) Possibly the first steps were using symbols to >represent names. The ancient Egyptions used concrete symbols to represent >homophones, sound-alike words, and then abstracted to using the picture of >an object to represent a sound in that object's name. > Just want to point out that there's still a few pictorial writing systems around (Chinese ideograms) and to say that phonetic writing systems are a few level of abstraction above pictorial ones looks not so obvious to me. - Emmanuel _____________________________________________________________________________ Emmanuel Mogenet <.^.> PGP Public Key on Request, MIME Accepted -oOO-V-OOo-- _____________________________________________________________________________ ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 14 Dec 1993 15:02:10 -0800 From: dkrieger@netcom.com (Dave Krieger) Subject: VVLS: Extropian story from Village Voice Literary Supplement Probably (c) 1993 by the Village Voice. Go look up "Fair Use" in "Nimmer on Copyright" if this bothers you. (On the cover:) DOWNLOAD YOUR BRAIN BY JULIAN DIBBELL (Table of Contents:) We Come In Peace -- For those about to evolve, we salute you: Julian Dibbell greets the citizens of Extropia. Page 28. TERMINAL IDENTITIES Extropians Boot Up by Julian Dibbell The millenium wasn't supposed to go out like this. From the first scholasticist baby-steps toward enlightenment through high capitalism's exuberant feats of industrial light and magic, it's been a thousand-year drama starring the secular-humanist triumph over ancient deferences to the natural and the supernatural. By all narrative rights the show should be wrapping up about now with a nice millenarian advant of boundless prosperity driven by sheer human cleverness. Instead, the humanist model of progress slouches toward the year 2000 harassed by grim omens of its limitations: a plague whose indomitability mocks technoscience's pretenses to omnipotence, a hole in the ozone that flashes a stop sign at humanity's restless transformation of its environment, and a fallen empire that squabbles lethally over the wreckage of scientific socialism's dreams of paradise on earth. While religious fundamentalists, crystal-gazers, and certain stripes of post-modern theory-head tank up on fin-de-millenium euphoria, partisans of the millenium's defining cultural current may just have to sit this rapture out. But not if the emergent intellectual subculture of radical humanist technophiles who call themselves Extropians has anything to say about it--and the thing is, they do have plenty to say. In the virtual pages of an Internet mailing list averaging some 40 messages a day (many of which verge on essay-length), and in the hard zine copy of the biannual Extropy: The Journal of Trans-humanist Thought, the movement's combustible mix of fringe academics, over-educated computer programmers, and renegade philosophers is busy hammering out the details of a rigorously secular millennium-to-come whose cosmic sweep rivals anything in Revelation. Nor have the Extropians allowed themselves to be outclassed in their choice of media by the Judeo-Christian people of the book. In addition to their desktop discourse, they further encode their worldview in an evolving roster of non- and science-fiction tomes deemed officially Extropian-friendly. Bounding from the elegant science of Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers' classic exposition of complexity theory, Order out of Chaos: Man's New Dialogue With Nature (Bantam, $12.50 paper), to the Joycean ejaculations of Robert Anton Wilson's postpsychedelic inner guidebook Prometheus Rising (New Falcon Publications, $12.95 paper), the Extropian canon clears quantum cosmology, Darwinian economics, and cutting-edge artificial intelligence theory in the leap. Underlying this eclectic syllabus, however, is a simple eschatological guarantee: that almost any attribute ever associated with godhead--immortality, coextension with the universe, omnipotent intelligence--will some day be attained by humans through steady application of the same cleverness that's given us stock exchanges, cable television, and programmable toaster ovens. Never mind entropy's insistence that, sooner or later, everything put together falls apart. True to their name, the Extropians are having none of it, wagering instead that the gradual accumulation of biocultural order and information known as evolution is an equally insistent trend, certain to overcome in the long run whatever barriers the universe may put in its way. "No mysteries are sacrosanct," writes Extropy editor-in-chief Max More in one of his periodic manifestos, "no limits unquestionable; the unknown will yield to the ingenious mind." Such blunt optimisim doesn't exactly blend in with the entropic scenery of the present historical landscape, but neither is it entirely out of sync with the culture at large. In particular, the Extropians' technofuturist rhetoric resonates like crazy with the public discourse currently buzzing around computers, whose reliably meteoric annual increases in power have roped off an area in which it's safe to speculate cheerfully about the shape of things to come. But where the technology-page pundits stick to relatively parochial prophecies of information super-highways and virtual shopping malls, Extropian thought hijacks the predictable arc of computing's future and makes it promise transcendence. Most Extropians foresee a moment not too far from now when computational muscle will get brawny enough to cheaply record and operate human minds, simulated in all their neuronal (and neurotic) complexity. Sketched out with informed precision in the canonical Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence (Harvard, $22.95; $8.95 paper), by tenured mad scientist and sometime Extropy contributor Hans Moravec, this particular prophecy culminates in a materialist transmigration of souls. "Uploaded" into software form, our minds will be liberated from their mortal bodies, free to inhabit in perpetuity whatever cyborg shapes become available. Our thoughts running at lightning speed, our identities recombining promiscuously with advanced artificial intelligences, we will have become, as Extropian taxonomy has it, posthumans. In the posthuman phase of this future history, our new robot frames will take on stupefying diversity and power as the miniaturization of info-tech is supplemented by the wundertools of nanotechnology. Dreamed up by physicist K. Eric Drexler, whose Engines of Creation (Anchor, $10.95 paper) rides high on the Extropian reading list, nanotech is a speculative but theoretically quite feasible science of molecular-scale machinery, promising absurdly vast increases in our manufacturing skills. For Extropians, that promise is our ticket off the planet and out to the far reaches of the universe. Colonizing space in great swarm-like and increasingly dense populations of superintelligent nanobots, we will in the end fill every nook and cranny of the cosmos, enlisting every last electron in the task of embodying our ceaselessly expansive, disembodied minds. Moreavec's sketch of this Extropian Omega Point combines the ecologist's worst conceivable nightmare of environmental exploitation with the mystic's most lucid dream of oneness with the universe, expressing them both with an engineer's detachment: "The final frontier wil be urbanized, ultimately, into an arena where every bit of activity is a meaningful computation: ... [the] universe will be transformed into a cyberspace." This terminal macadamization of the cosmic wilderness lies eons distant, of course, but we won't have to wait nearly that long to witness the Extropian millennium's commencement. The precise kick-off moment is referred to in Extropian lore as "the Singularity"--"a time in the future," writes More, "when everything will be so radically different from today, and changing so fast, that we cannot accurately foresee life beyond that horizon." Movement nanotechies expect the Singularity to arrive with decisive drama (in their messages to the mailing list they like to speculate about the drastic historical changes that will have transpired by the end of the day on which nanotech is perfected) and soon, possibly as early as the next century's first quarter. Despite the prophetic pitch of their pronouncements, Extropians remain die-hard rationalists, resistant to revealed truth of any kind even if it's the truth of their own predictions. Indeed, smug acceptance of the imminence of technosalvation has become a semi-official Extro no-no, lampooned in a recent list message that diagnosed "Awaiting the Singularity" as one of the "Seven Warning Signs" of a new nervous disorder dubbed "Rapture of the Future." And not even the most incurable sufferers of the malady can hope to sit back and wait quiescently for the Extropian future to come and get them. At the very least, belief in that future demands an investment of time and money in securing one's own postmortem cryonic suspension, just in case the technologies of immortality don't arrive this lifetime. In addition, as a way of getting acclimated to the furious pace of change awaiting anyone who lives long enough to shoot the Singularity's rapids, Max More prescribes a vigorous regimen of self-transformation by any means necessary: drugs both smart and recreational, on-line computer identity play, nontraditional living arrangements, positive-thinking visualization techniques (as seen in Tony Robbins info-mercials!), and even name changes (Max O'Connor became Max More, punningly advertising his philosphy of boundless expansion). But if anything focuses the Extropian mind on the here and now, it's the hard core of politics at the movement's center. That those politics are thoroughly libertarian should surprise no one familiar with subcultures rooted in either computers or the sci fi that Extropian thought so snugly borders. Still, the Extropians' is a libertarianism (or anarcho-capitalism, as some of them prefer) of rare sophistication, grounded in more than just the usual dosage of Robert A. Heinlein. Not that they deny his enduring influence, of course--the immortalist fantasies Methuselah's Children (Baen Books, $3.50 paper) and Time Enough for Love (Ace, $5.99 paper) are official Extropian classics--or that of the deathlessly yucky Ayn Rand, whose "novel" Atlas Shrugged (Signet, $6.99 paper) also makes the list. Yet even when the mailing list starts to clog up with anti-gun control tractlets, the Extropians' antiauthoritarian impulse seems most of all to flow from deep within the logic of the systems upon which their long-term optimism rests. In the workings of evolution, of mind, and even of the computer networks over which the Extropians conduct most of their discourse, the hallmark seems to be an elegant collective dance of undirected individual agents acting in their own self-interest. It's what complexity theory calls self-organization, Max More calls Spontaneous Order, and most Extropians call anarchy or, simply, freedom. If you want to call it a hopelessly naive prescription for the global and social problems of the 20th century's closing years, be my guest. The moment we live in is, after all, one in which the mortal body is still very much with us. It's a moment in which no amount of reasoned optimism can quite dispel the threat of civilization-crushing environmental diastster. And it's a moment in which, therefore, Extropianism's laissez-faire heedlessness of these bodies' and this earth's pressing claims borders on reckless endangerment of the species--or would, if the movement's influence on mainstream thought loomed any larger than, say, the Spartacus Youth League's. But before you assign the Extropians to your list of merely interesting wingnuts, remember this: we humans have been around for thousands of millennia now, and if we make it out of this one alive, we could face many thousands more, or even an eternity of them. The millenarian long view, in other words, is not one we should abandon lightly. And while it may strike you as either a sick joke or a clever one that the only going heirs to Karl Marx's late great secular humanist millenarianism are a quasi-crackpot band of radical free marketeers, it's no joke at all that the quasi-crackpots' vision could turn out to be our best guide through the strange eons to follow. Should intellectual history repeat itself and Extropianism get the same shot at shaping human destiny that Marxism did, let's hope this time around it's not as tragedy but as the epic space opera we surely have in us. ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 14 Dec 93 18:04:12 CST From: moormajb@vuse.vanderbilt.edu (Joseph Moorman) Subject: Current Gun Laws There is an organization which sees the 2nd amendment as "the government should be afraid of its citizens." I am not quite sure what the name of the group is, but I think it is called "Citizens for the Second Amendment." Also, during the past summer a representative from the Cato Institute testified before congress and iterated this point about the second amendment to Chairman Joseph Biden. Biden said that he respected this position more than any other anti-gun-control position because of consistency with libertarian principles (though he himself of course does not believe in libertarian principles). -Joe Moorman ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 14 Dec 93 22:23:28 WET From: rjc@gnu.ai.mit.edu (Ray) Subject: Reverse Polish Moon Treaty Robin Hanson writes: > The "Reverse Polish Moon Treaty" seems to me an odd focus of efforts to > avoid poverty. As I understand it, the proposal is to give everyone > alive on some date equal shares in mutual funds which own parts of the > moon, and then to forbid folks to sell their shares for several decades. > This is as an alternative to accepting folks homesteading the moon. I don't want to offend Robin or make an example of him, but I believe this is the first recorded example of Tim May's description of someone using his opponent's arguments as his own. ;-) Maybe I am misremembering, but Robin, weren't you the first person on the list to start advocating an "inheritance day" where we all get shares of the universe because the first one ot get nanotech would end up homesteading everything with von neumann machines? -- Ray Cromwell | Engineering is the implementation of science; -- -- rjc@gnu.ai.mit.edu | politics is the implementation of faith. -- ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 15 Dec 93 3:24:24 GMT From: nancy@genie.slhs.udel.edu Subject: Reverse Polish Moon Treaty What's blue goo? I've only heard of grey goo. Nancy Lebovitz ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 14 Dec 93 22:34:10 WET From: rjc@gnu.ai.mit.edu (Ray) Subject: Reverse Polish Moon Treaty nancy@genie.slhs.udel.edu writes: > > What's blue goo? I've only heard of grey goo. Nanocops. -- Ray Cromwell | Engineering is the implementation of science; -- -- rjc@gnu.ai.mit.edu | politics is the implementation of faith. -- ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 14 Dec 1993 19:35:15 -0800 (PST) From: tcmay@netcom.com (Timothy C. May) Subject: Reverse Polish Moon Treaty > What's blue goo? I've only heard of grey goo. > > Nancy Lebovitz "Blue goo" is the police goo that gets created to run the grey goo out of town. Of course, most of us realize that blue goo is perhaps an even greater threat. On a serious note, realize that nobody in the world has even the slightest idea about making a real-world self-replicator, let alone an "eat anything" self-replicator (which is what grey goo is). --Tim May -- .......................................................................... Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@netcom.com | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero 408-688-5409 | knowledge, reputations, information markets, W.A.S.T.E.: Aptos, CA | black markets, collapse of governments. Higher Power: 2^756839 | Public Key: PGP and MailSafe available. Note: I put time and money into writing this posting. I hope you enjoy it. ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 14 Dec 1993 22:36:34 -0500 (EST) From: "Mr. Richard Seabrook" Subject: Baby Killing Assault Rifles - Glock 17 According to Arthur Hlavaty: > > I think it deliciously ironic that Jupiter-size brain wannabes are talking > about guns. :-) > I think it's revolting. Dick S. ------------------------------ End of Extropians Digest V93 #348 *********************************