From: Avatar Polymorph (avatarpolymorph@hotmail.com)
Date: Sun Nov 24 2002 - 17:17:01 MST
Mez writes:
"I agree that the ability to restructure the adult genome and
biology at will is more prone to creating class stratification than the
ability to structure the genome of an unborn child.
That having been said, there is a huge body of evidence that the
the ability to dictate the structure of an unborn child will be here
in a matter of years.
There is substantially less agreement on the timeframe for a
mature molecular nanotechnology that will be able to restructure adult
biology.
mez"
Good to hear about your background and aims, Ramez, and your forthcoming
book.
As far as I am aware, temporary genetic therapies have preceded alteration
of child dna. Which comes first will probably be a social issue as much as
anything. Probably fixing up diseases will be the thing initially sponsored.
Timeframe for a mature molecular nanotechnology? I have seen anyone arguing
for anything after 2050 - at least not for a few years. I predict 2020. Many
Singularitarians are more optimistic than that.
Presumably we will see the fuller emergence of materials nanotech first,
then intelligent nanotech, engineering nanotech, then assembler nanotech,
self-reproducing assembler nanotech and finally intra-cellular nanotech at
the same time as such other secondary systems as terraforming systems and
space-construction systems.
===
Regarding your comments on "class".
Class is not currently genetically based. The term has no current crossover
connection with genetics.
I do not believe it would be ethical to link money with genetics or
medicine. We are all going to be immortal shortly. Access to assembler
resources and other resources must be on the basis of project need and
democratic voting structures, not pre-nanotech economic structures from the
era of manual work (pre-macrobots/pre-assemblers).
In the brief interregnum we are living in (as we ascend the Singularity) I
believe it is important to remember that all sentient beings (certainly all
humans) hold moral worth, whatever their chosen form or level of
neurological complexity. We should concentrate our pre-assembler
(remembering that as Drexler pointed out assemblers can build macrobots)
manually based (mostly) efforts on basic health and nanotech. In any event,
once we move to a post-manual labour environment, adjusting our bodies (for
those of us who retain a cell-based system) will be a matter of software,
which is cheap and indeed in some areas costs almost nothing, particularly
in larger timeframes.
I personally do not believe it is possible to discuss these issues in
general (genetics) without discussing nanotech (whether it arises in one
year or three hundred) and immortality (billions of years at least is
effective immortality). The only issue of real debate is the number of overt
discrete children that can be achieved in limited space, and that awaits the
forthcoming fuller understanding of cosmology/physics that is the core of
the Singularity. As a minimum, one can only say that at the very least every
human will be able to have a few children over the next say 15 billion
years. As a worse case scenario, those individuals who want to have a
children every year (in the very traditional human sense) may not be able to
do so.
I personally also think it is very important that children should not be
altered to remove their free will or their ability to self-boost, which
should be allowed full expression upon their reaching maturity (as fairly
defined). [I would hold this to apply as much to AI as to traditional humans
and boosted/blended humans and AIs.]
Towards Ascension
Avatar Polymorph
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