From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Tue Jun 12 2001 - 11:12:40 MDT
Felix Ungman wrote:
>
> It was good enough for my father, it has been good enough for me... :-) Seriously, if you set your standards so high that nothing but an utopia is good enough for your child, you'll never have any.
And do I have any children? Why, no, I don't. So in this case, it seems,
your prediction is correct.
The question was not meant to be rhetorical, however. Depending on how
"merely human" the world is post-Singularity, there might be benefits to
being born today (i.e., being one of only six billion sentients in all of
human space who were alive *before* the Singularity). One hopes
transhumans have better things to care about, but it's a possible
consideration.
There are certainly altruistic benefits to being born pre-Singularity -
the chance to play a part in the birth of human space - but that requires
that your kid grow up fast enough to break even. Even with the future
Internet dumping power into the hands of thirteen-year-olds, your child
would have to move tearingly fast to have a real effect on the
Singularity. On the other hand, if you raise your child as an Extropian,
he'd have a better chance then most.
-- -- -- -- --
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 08:08:05 MST