[p2p-research] Drone hacking

[Michel Bauwens]

the silly view, or fear, that robots will wipe us out was practically
mainstream in the transhumanist circles, or at least it was in the
mid-nineties, and it was taken seriously by its opponents, such as
kirkpatrick sale. I suspect the field has matured though, but not enough to
suspend their millenianist dreams in the singularity rapture.

Returning the attack that people who have doubts about reductionist views
are emotional, I have to suspect that people who deny levels of depth in
other living and human beings, do so out of projection, i.e. not having a
perception  or experience of that depth in themselves? It is otherwise hard
to explain why a instinctual/emotional/intellectual complex living and
thinking being would expect more simple machine intelligence to take over,
or to have machinic brains programmable by binary programs.

I'm saying the latter mainly to show how easy it is to subjectivize
opponents, instead of using argumentation.

Michel

On Tue, Dec 22, 2009 at 11:56 PM, Andy Robinson <ldxar1 at gmail.com> wrote:

> "your view of human nature is typically reductionist, oh well ... monkeys
> on a thumb writing shakespeare and building cathedrals, why not ... it's a
> quaint view, but I guess you have seen monkeys like that,"
>
> Yeh, they had one for president.
> http://www.nobeliefs.com/politics/BushChimp.jpg
>
> Oh, and chimps do write Shakespeare, it just takes an infinite amount of
> time, or an infinite number of chimps.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem
>
> I can tell certain people are getting increasingly desperate, because they
> are moving from the merits of their arguments to the supposedly dubious
> motivations of those who oppose the arguments.  Which apparently comes down
> to being afraid of progress because of special interest reasons.  And
> boasting of how unemotional they are - which is an exact proof of its
> opposite, that they are VERY emotionally invested in their 'scientific'
> fundamentalism.  All very silly.
>
> To be honest - if I was going to try to assess the impact (rather than the
> viability) of all-knowing computers, I could come up with a number of
> reasons to be quite afraid, which ought to carry moral weight for my
> opponents in this debate - such as that, without a need for human workers,
> capitalists will let even more of the world's population starve than they
> already do; or that a totalitarian regime will use these computers to
> produce total social regulation; or that the robots will develop autonomy
> and take over from humans or wipe us out.  If I really thought these
> developments were viable and that they would have these effects, I'd be
> calling for them to be stopped however we can now, by much the same ways we
> need to use to stop climate change.  The last thing I'd want to do is deny
> them.
>
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