Re: Exo-Singularity 101. (required)

Eliezer S Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Mon, 07 Jun 1999 22:35:31 -0500

Pvthur@aol.com wrote:
>
> Just curious as to how far this notion has caught on in classical scientific
> circles. (astronomy, evolutionary biology, seti)

Who knows? I'd say that so far it's caught on with scientists, not sciences. Don't know what percentage of scientists, either, but I'd be surprised to find that more than 10% had even heard of transhumanism, much less the Singularity. Of course, with the few Wired articles, it could be more than that by now.

> -or-
>
> When will "The Singularity Cometh" be an article on 60 Minutes?

Ashley Dunn wrote "In Vinge's <something>, an oracle of digital doom" for the New York Times, although it may have been only for the "CyberTimes" Web-only section - I'm not sure.

It will be a 60-Minutes show when enough people write in and ask for one; after which they'll get everything wrong, make a big issue of Frankenscience, interview only people who are hostile to the concept, do something horrible to the term like what happened to "hackers", and in general put everyone off their lunch for years to come.

For my money, the best bet for publicizing the concept would be a sequel to _The Matrix_.

-- 
           sentience@pobox.com          Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
        http://pobox.com/~sentience/tmol-faq/meaningoflife.html
Running on BeOS           Typing in Dvorak          Programming with Patterns
Voting for Libertarians   Heading for Singularity   There Is A Better Way