From: Samantha Atkins (samantha@objectent.com)
Date: Thu Dec 28 2000 - 01:03:42 MST
"Eliezer S. Yudkowsky" wrote:
>
> "J. R. Molloy" wrote:
> >
> > I think one becomes a little less sane while seriously
> > considering destroying the human race in a mass extinction event called
> > Mutually Assured Destruction.
>
> Sorry. I still have to disagree with this. If Earth gets wiped out by
> grey goo, and I and four other people are left floating in orbit among the
> smoking remains, with no computing equipment and only a month worth of
> food, so that the human species is gone, and the Singularity is gone, and
> there is absolutely nothing I can do about any of it, then I would
> immediately shift my underlying philosophy away from the Singularity, and
> even shift away from the altruism that is currently a consequence of being
> one person on a planet of six billion, so that I would still be a nice,
> positive-sum person, but weighted towards stewardship of the 20% of
> humanity's happiness that was my own personal domain, and I would thus go
> about continuing to create happiness and minimize pain, albeit on a
> smaller scale, until such time as the food ran out.
>
> That's sanity.
I think it would come closer to keeping me sane in such insance
circumstances if I spent my remaining time writing up the racial memoirs
and broadcasting/recording them so that some other race might benefit
from our mistakes. Ours (including my esteemed self) would be pretty
clearly toast.
- samantha
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