From: Eric Watt Forste (arkuat@pigdog.org)
Date: Mon Oct 06 1997 - 12:43:34 MDT
Dan Clemmensen writes:
> I find it very frustrating that the list spends so much time on
> irrelevant issues of economics and politics. The current economic
> and political environment will not change significantly prior to
> the singularity: there's not enough time, even if the event occurs
> in 2025.
Dan, why do you think that issues of economics and politics
will be irrelevant after the Singularity?
Do you think that post-Singularity entities (PSEs) will not
require scarce physical resources to carry out their projects?
I suspect they will, and that much contemporary economic theory
will be applicable to analyzing their behavior as a result.
Do you think that PSEs will be incapable of forcing one another to
do things non-consensually, and that they will not develop
institutional means of minimizing or at least controlling this sort
of circumstance? I concede that this seems more plausible (blue
goo?) than the "postscarcity" nonsense, but it doesn't seem
very likely to me.
Eliezer's position that right and wrong objectively exist, and that
we do not currently have adequate cognitive access to them, seems
like a very reasonable position to me. Where he loses me is
that part where he seems to assume that some future entity is
more likely to have adequate cognitive access to objective
right and wrong than we do.
(This is where Tipler's baroque fantasies of the Omega point lose
me too. The Omega point looks to me like nothing more or less than
the marriage of Heaven and Hell. Tipler goes on and on about the
Heaven part, and never mentions the Hell.)
-- Eric Watt Forste ++ arkuat@idiom.com ++ expectation foils perception -pcd
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