From: Samantha Atkins (samantha@objectent.com)
Date: Sun Sep 23 2001 - 17:52:00 MDT
"J. R. Molloy" <jr@shasta.com> writes:
> From: "Robert Coyote" <coyyote@hotmail.com>
> > This list, altho interesting, seems to have a dearth of practical
> > applications in extropy
> > things one can do right now is my main interest
> >
> > comments?
>
> A real and present danger is that the practical aspects of extropy exceed the
> capacity of human social order to adjust to it and to compensate for the
> accompanying changes. Therefore a helpful enterprise would be to educate and
> inform the general public about the benefits of accelerating technology, and
> to assuage fears that spontaneous order in autonomous complex adaptive systems
> (intelligent robots) threatens human life. For example, recent alarmist
> comments by Stephen Hawking to the effect that the human race is in danger of
> being "taken over" by machine intelligence should prompt responsible
> extropians to formulate more reasonable perspectives on this issue.
This is disinformation and quite dishonest. What Hawking said was not only not
alarmist, it is also quite mild as a possible future scenario compared to
much that many here believe and are actually working to acheive.
> An obvious threat to extropic progress is the religious fanatic terrorism such
> as that of September 11, 2001. If you want to apply some practical extropy
> right now, help to spread the memes of scientific reason and objectivity so
> that humanity is not drowned in a sea of religious dementia and tribalism.
Much has also been done that is very unextropic in the name of science and reason
supposedly. The megadeaths due to communism came out of supposedly more
enlightened and sceintific ideas about human beings and the possibilities
of human societies. Huge death tolls also come out of scape-goating ideologies.
- samantha
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