What do I want? To serve the ultimate good, yes, but what do I hope the ultimate good turns out to be? Well, to quote yet ANOTHER unpublished work - really, this should all be done in a week or two...
> Most of us, I think, believe that the Singularity is the best hope
> for humanity. The Singularity holds out the possibility of
> winning the Grand Prize, the true Utopia, the
> best-of-all-possible-worlds, the Apotheosis - not just freedom
> from pain and stress and a sterile round of endless physical
> pleasures (not that I'd object to a few thousand years of that,
> but it would get boring eventually), but the prospect of endless
> growth for every human being - growth in mind, in intelligence,
> in strength of personality; life without bound, without end;
> experiencing everything we've dreamed of experiencing,
> becoming everything we've ever dreamed of being; not for a
> billion years, or ten-to-the-billionth years, but forever... or
> perhaps embarking together on some still greater adventure of
> which we cannot even conceive.
And to quote from a published or at least sent-to-the-list song of mine:
> Nanotech comin' and it's gonna
> Grant you longevity
> Bring you prosperity
> Build you a brewery
> Nanotech comin' and it's gonna
> Create your paradise
> And then it's gonna turn it into goo
Take a wild guess which one I prefer...
(Incidentally, if anyone wants to stick "Apotheosis" in the Lextropicon with the above definition, it's fine by me.)
--
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