At 09:34 PM 9/28/99 -0400, you wrote:
>I half-agree with Eliezer and Lee. It's definitely a good idea to be able to
>look past other people's indelicacy in phrasing; we just disagree with
>how much effort we should make when originating speech.
Again, I ask, are we talking about simple words, or a form of action? This is my point of divergence with some of what has been written on this thread, and I hope that someone will address it. Emotions do not constitute the sole mechanism through which persons formulate a reaction to written or verbal communication, and to reduce it to that misses an opportunity to address an aspect of posthuman development.
As we move into realms of uploading, AI and other transhuman futures, symbolic forms of communication will take on greater significance. If an AI or an uploaded entity can only act digitally, then every communication it utters also consitutes a form of action, and actions generally fall under some sort of self-governance mechanism. The decisions we make now as to how to communicate on the Internet could eventually relate to how we develop methods of AI interaction. The initial design of an AI or uploaded entity will include the current understanding of communications in a digital medium, of which the best example we have is the Internet.
Kathryn Aegis