From: Brent Allsop (allsop@fc.hp.com)
Date: Tue May 29 2001 - 15:19:44 MDT
Natasha,
Your list looks good to me.
Didn't tool usage start around Autralopithecus and
agriculture/trading... start sometime around Homo sapiens?
Also, it bothers me the way everyone talks about the
"singularity" the way they do. Sure, the progress rate in 100 or even
1000 years could be considered something like a "singularity" and make
our current progress look like nothing but noise, but there is still a
big difference between such "singularity" like fantastic growth rates
and being omnipotent, omniscient...
Here are a few significant future milestones I can think of.
* Human level Artificial Intelligence (In my personal view,
the more important discovery of Qualia and achieving the ability to
eff, expand, and share the conscious worlds made of phenomenal
qualities in our brain.)
* Cure for aging. People (perhaps even up-loads?) would still
die or be lost from accidents or catastrophes, but there would at
least be the possibility of living forever at this level.
* True immortality. This milestone is achieved when no person
ever dies again (unless they freely choose such). This will likely be
achieved when we can "backup" and restore what we are and have the
ability to duplicate our backups such that we never lose all of them
again? If we think we are there, but then some unexpected catastrophe
kills some people, we would not yet be there. It'd be kind of like we
think we now have a permanent manned presence in space forever more,
but then again, maybe not.
* Achieve a perfect history (to the point that every
significant memory [this would also include the ability to restore or
resurrect anyone at any state they ever existed] can be recovered) of
the earth. We will have finally paid back our debt to our
ancestors/nature for creating us and giving us what we have, by
resurrecting them all into what could be compared to "heaven". At
this point the job of the historian would be complete, there would be
no more work to do, because it would already all be known - at least
as far as the history of the earth was concerned.... Will were ever
achieve this?
* Omniscience, Omnipotence... I love considering this one.
Theists are always arguing whether or not God has omni* qualities
while extropians have the same (absurd?) arguments about our future
selves! ;)
Can anyone else think of some other significant milestones we
might hope to achieve some day? Perhaps we will never achieve some of
these, especially the Omniscience ones...?
Surely we will not accomplish all of this, and the billions
and billions of other mile stones we can't yet conceive of in between
some of these infinitely distant steps in one "singularity" of a
nanosecond!? Even at near infinite progression rates, we still have a
looooooong way to go don't we!?
Brent Allsop
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