On Tue, Nov 30, 1999 at 05:40:53PM -0500, Robin Hanson wrote:
> >... "Yes, but you can't want what you want". In the future it
> >will be possible to reach in and select what you want (your motivation).
>
> I agree this is a big important change. And in an important way, this change
> makes it *easier* to envision the future. At first, we will
> replace what we currently want with what we currently want to want. And then
> we will replace that with what we then want to want, which is probably related
Mmmf. I'd like to agree with you, but let me play devil's advocate:
If such technology becomes available, I believe it will be used by certain regimes (yes, you know who) to ensure that what we want is *what they want us to want* (at least, for a noticeable subset of the human species).
No, this isn't some half-witted Star Trek Borg implementation. It's politics. Noam Chomsky had a point when he observed that the mechanisms of political coercion in a nominally democratically accountable state must be more subtle than those in a dictatorship. Try and extrapolate this theory to a framework where human nature is maleable and we arrive at something very frightening indeed:
Being able to change what we want implies that _others_ can change what we want.