From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Mon Sep 17 2001 - 15:18:07 MDT
For the record, I should note that the issue that has been arising here -
the ethical error that, dismayingly, seems not to be confined to Robert
Bradbury - is not an error of transhumanism, nor the Singularity. It is a
human error. It has been made by literally billions of humans throughout
history, so many that the error and our reaction to it is embedded in
emotional hardware. This is not an issue that arises only when discussing
the Singularity. It is an issue that arises whenever you discuss some
proposal that is expected to save lives or benefit humanity, from
"democracy" to "socialism" and all the way back to "Let's organize the
tribe into teams of four warriors, we can defeat the rival tribe better
that way".
And of course, the ubiquity of this "logic", right or wrong, is why humans
have learned to ignore it and simply judge it as a pure, unjustified
defection.
-- -- -- -- --
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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