"Robert J. Bradbury" wrote:
> There are any number of bright individuals who I can think
> of that fall into this category (Dr. Smalley on nanobots,
We don't know whether nanobots are feasible. There are a few
factors we're missing still. But blanket dismissal of machine-phase
self-rep nanorobotics at this day and age (read the literature!
read the literature! It will boggle your mind) is at least as
silly, and Smalley is certainly guilty of that.
> Dr. Vogel on uploading, Ray Kurzweil arguing that intelligence
Don't know this avian dude. I think he needs a session with
some computational neuroscientists, however. Wonder what he'll
say to http://www.csi.uoregon.edu/projects/celegans/
> will expand at light speed or we are the first species to
While Kurzweil should sometimes lay off his glass pipe,
he's right on the money on this one. Evolutionary selection
of edge autoreplicators does imply intelligence is expansive,
though hugging the lightcone front is asking for a lot.
Anyway, we should see lots of datapoints for rare Earth, soon,
or I'll publicly eat my mouse.
> experience the singularity, etc.) And these are the bright
> and educated people, presumably those who would change
> their minds, should one be able to extract their assumptions
> and demonstrate they are on skakey ground.
So are we, but this is the fringe, so we're allowed (and expected)
to. A rather nice place to be, I don't think I'm moving away any
time soon.
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