From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Sun Dec 24 2000 - 13:05:44 MST
"J. R. Molloy" wrote:
>
> I didn't participate in this survey, but I can tell you that when I was 15
> years old, I fully expected to die in combat someday on some muddy Asian
> soil. Things have turned out altogether differently than I had expected,
> and I may owe my life to the atom bomb. Without nuclear weapons, I
> probably would have been drafted and sent off to war, there to die with
> millions of others. The bomb made the war cold. Thanks to all the
> scientists who continue to make total war unthinkable by making possible
> weapons of mass destruction.
Perhaps you do owe your life to the atom bomb. It is a valid point.
Nonetheless, calling total war "unthinkable" is not smart. War has not
been made unthinkable. It has been made more dangerous. It has been made
less profitable. It has not been made impossible.
-- -- -- -- --
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 15:32:32 MST