Spudboy100@aol.com writes:
> The camera pans right and the Ghost of Rod Serling speaks: "Ladies and
> gentlemen, submitted for your approval. One Anders Sandburg, a victim in the
> laudable search for prolonging human consciousness, and giving hope to
> Billions, now a mere, unaware, data-set in the long, cold, darkness, of The
> Extropian Zone" (Load, cascading, Trumpet Flourish!>
>
> Moral: The technology better be flawless before people hop on the ride. But I
> guess that was true of the first Roller-Coaster?
Exactly. I definitely doesn't want to be the first upload but rather
part of the research team (a scary thought for all would-be-uploads :-)
In reality, people opt for a technology when the benefits seem to
outweigh the cost (as well as various other technology adoption
factors); there is a group of innovators and early adopters who will
try things long before the others and be the real guinea pigs. Often
people adopt technology long before it is flawless, even when it is
dangerous (airbags, airplanes, operating systems). As a Stanislaw Lem
character remarked, we really ought to raise a monument to the honor
of all those who died while attempting to discover what was edible or
not - they helped us immensely. The same goes for the betatesters.
Here is something to think about: how to make it profitable to be an
early adopter or beta tester? Society as a whole needs them, but they
do not seem to derive that much benefit themselves and I would expect
that memetic evolution would make them relatively scarce. We might
want to create institutions that help them to thrive and produce
experience.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Mon May 28 2001 - 09:50:16 MDT