From: Mike Linksvayer (ml@gondwanaland.com)
Date: Thu Sep 13 2001 - 14:54:28 MDT
On Thu, Sep 13, 2001 at 02:23:04AM -0400, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote:
> This, however, is not the reason I'm not in shock. I think I recall
> pretty clearly my reaction when I switched on my computer, opened Netscape
> email, and saw in the helpful headlines that the World Trade Center had
> ceased to exist; I saw it as a piece of future history that had just
> turned real. It was something that any number of novels or fictional
> timelines might have included to add color. So that fictional construct
> turned real and thereby moved us a step into the twenty-first century,
> albeit not in a nice way. Essentially the inverted version of the
> reaction I had on reading about Dolly the sheep:
>
> "Whoa, we really are living in the future."
>
> My second reaction was to be glad that I wasn't reading "New York,
> Chicago, and Washington D.C. Destroyed By Nuclear Detonations." We're
> seeing the lite version of the "domestic massive terrorist disaster"
> scenario here. The only really unusual thing about the disaster is that
> it happened in America. Most of the impact, crashing global stock markets
> and so on, consists of people reacting to the terrorism. A nuclear weapon
> destroying New York, on the other hand, would be a significant disaster
> regardless of how people reacted to it.
Almost exactly my initial reaction. Upon waking Tuesday morning
I checked a stock quote page, which said markets were shut down
due to a terrorist attack in New York. A few tense moments passed
while the article loaded, hoping it wasn't nuclear or biological.
> My reaction, on the whole, is that people are trying to forcibly make this
> into one of the most significant events in world history. I don't think
> it is. Not intrinsically. I understand the impulse to magnify the
> importance. One doesn't want several thousand people to have died for
> something that doesn't ultimately change the course of history. But I
> think we'll see similar events in the future, and I don't think those will
> change the course of history either. It's just a lot of unnecessary,
> pointless deaths.
>
> If the US does do anything real, militarily, it will probably involve more
> death and destruction than was caused by the destruction of the World
> Trade Center, dozens or hundreds of bombs instead of two planes, dropped
> on some dirt-poor country far less capable of dealing with the disasters
> resulting from each and every bomb impact, and the only real end result
> will be more hatred of the United States. I don't expect that will stop
> the United States from doing it anyway.
Absolutely.
> This is pretty much how I expected the future to go. If we're lucky,
> we'll make it to the Singularity inside the decade and we won't see
> weapons of mass destruction used on major cities during that interval.
> But if we aren't that lucky, I won't be surprised.
I'll be astonished if we are that lucky. Intelligent people should
feel this pin prick, recognize that a dagger thrust is all but
inevitable, and start making contingency plans.
-- Mike Linksvayer http://gondwanaland.com/ml/
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