From: hal@finney.org
Date: Tue Sep 12 2000 - 15:45:29 MDT
Corey asks,
> What exactly IS the relevance of the gun discussion to Extropianism?
I think many contemporary issues have great relevance to Extropianism,
not only guns, but abortion and drug policy as well.
With guns, we have a dangerous technology. Should it be in the hands of
private individuals? Or should society reserve access to the government?
This question is going to arise more and more in the future. Should
people have access to biotech? To nanotech? To AI? To uploading?
All of these technologies can be dangerous, some far more than guns.
As Extropians I think we generally support the goal of allowing
individuals to decide for themselves which technologies they want to use.
With abortion, we have the question, when does an entity rise to the
level that others should intervene to keep it alive? Fetuses are
a gray area, but technology is only going to make the matter worse.
With AIs, artificial life forms, uplifted animals, we are going to face
the same issues. When does it become a crime to turn off your computer,
analogous to aborting a fetus? When does killing an intelligent animal
require you to be charged with murder?
And with drugs, we have the question of whether people should be allowed
to alter their own mental functioning as they choose. Obviously future
technologies are going to allow for far more options in this area, from
do-it-yourself drug-building information on the internet, to direct
alterations of your mental pathways, to uploads who are able to adjust
their own moods at will. If we won't allow people to mess with their
brains today, what does that say about the possibilities for doing so
in the future?
Another common thread in all of these issues is that not only will there
be new challenges, but they will become much more difficult to detect
and control. Today you can theoretically catch someone who is buying
guns, getting an abortion, or purchasing drugs. But in the future
there may be high tech equivalents of these actions which can be done
entirely in the safety of your own home. To have effective control
over technologies may require a highly invasive surveillance state,
which raises many problems of its own.
The issues we face today, difficult as they are to deal with, are only
a taste of the problems ahead. We need to identify sound philosophical
principles which can guide our decisions on these matters, in order to
chart a consistent course through the issues we will soon be dealing with.
I think the Extropian Principles have implications for how these matters
should be dealt with today, and this makes them appropriate topics for
discussion, in my opinion.
Hal
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