Damien Broderick <d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au> writes:
> Somehow, I don't think he gets it.
I think he takes the long view. In the long run change has always been
nearly smooth, disasters local and humans humans. Where we differ is
that we think that this will not hold forever. The singularity can be
seen as a bifurcation point in the mathematical sense, where a smooth
and incremental change of one parameter leads to a discontinous or at
least qualitatively different behavior. This is not really part of
Brand's view of how things are looking. On the truly big scale - where
neanderthals, homo sapiens, homo excelsior and all their weird
descendants are close neighbours - I think many of us roughly agree
with him again that things are fairly smooth. It is just that compared
to all previous changes we might be approaching a much more radical
and profound change now than ever before, and that makes his book seem
odd.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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