From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Mon Aug 06 2001 - 20:41:04 MDT
Durant Schoon wrote:
>
> The sneaky way would be to send nanobots undetectedly down to their
> planet. By invading the brain of their brightest young citizen,
> plant the idea that he/she invented the concept of Friendliness and
> should start an institute for the Singularity and ... hey, wait a
> second ...
>
> ;-)
>
> PS -
>
> Yes, that violates volition ... or does it ?!
If for some insane reason that were the Friendliest way of accomplishing
whatever, it wouldn't violate my volition. I long ago signed over my
right to complain. But it's a ludicrously roundabout way of accomplishing
something that would be perfectly straightforward given direct
intervention. Are the very large number of people who will be taken
completely by surprise one fine morning (it's always morning somewhere)
going to experience that much of a difference, in practice, between a
Friendliness wavefront sweeping out of another star system and a
Friendliness wavefront sweeping out of SIAI's basement? What would be the
point? If you're going to send help, there's no reason to do so
unobtrusively rather than blatantly.
-- -- -- -- --
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://intelligence.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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