From: Avatar Polymorph (avatarpolymorph@hotmail.com)
Date: Thu Nov 28 2002 - 01:16:26 MST
Ramez writes:
In the end, even though we're likely to be quite wrong in
predicting the future, we engage in it anyway. You predict assemblers by
2020. I predict it'll be much farther away. Likely we're both wrong
and the future will be different than either of us conceives.
Avatar:
It's good you're discussing the future, and it's good that a
nanotechnologist is discussing it. As far as the Singularity itself goes, I
leave argumentation about that up to the body of work already behind such...
it's not terribly productive for me, any more than arguing Darwinism (except
in relation to Stage II directed evolution). As for my own writings, they're
focussing on ethics... my own predictions for the future are fairly wild
extensions of possibility but not important to my ethical understanding.
In fact, neither immortality nor assembler tech nor nanotech is really much
of a debatable issue in terms of longer timeframes... no delay is going to
reach anything like the 10,000 year timeframe for production of a Matrioshka
brain let us say (not that I believe such to be inevitable nor necessarily
at all desirable). The only wild speculation is whether Cyberia ends just
over a century beyond the big "moment" discovery of the Singularity in the
immediate future (two and a bit decades) to some "high-level systems
application" beyond nanotech (say femtotech). The more the ability to
manipulate the environment beyond the nano-level and the more we conceive of
bypassing entropy the closer we move to a more extropian position, and the
more libertarianism and responsibility can be compatible. Nanotech and
virtuality guarantee base level freedoms. Anything approaching femtotech and
spacetime manipulation at science fiction levels will allow for high level
freedoms. Even if this is a mere dream to keep alive in the billenia to
come, it's certainly a worthy dream...
Towards Ascension
Avatar Polymorph
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