From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Tue Nov 25 1997 - 02:20:17 MST
Brent Allsop <allsop@swttools.fc.hp.com> writes:
> Anders Sandberg <asa@nada.kth.se> responded:
>
> > Your vision sounds nice, but can it be guaranteed? We live in a
> > world where things do go wrong, where unexpected things happens
> > despite precautions and where not everything is done with positive
> > consequences in mind. Our development is linked with dangers, and
> > the future tends to turn out vastly different than our predictions.
>
> True, but just because some religious people reject technology
> all together and are surpassed and made insignificant by the rest of
> the technological world, doesn't mean they loose their right to exist
> or to need!
Exactly. I don't think there are any extropians (if there are, they
should think about the principles a bit closer) that think eradicating
the "pesky mehums" is a good thing. But not every posthuman will be a
saint, and a slight error in judgement of a transcendent superbeing
could destroy the remaining humans ("Oops... my cleaning nanites have
just cleaned away the entire biosphere. What a mess. Let's hope nobody
notices..."), not to mention Eugene's scenario of the posthumans one
day deciding that carbon based life is so trivial and simple that
there is no need to preserve it outside virtual reality (or at all).
What I want is to find ways of ensuring human survival even in the
very long run, even if the ethics of our descendants changes. The
problem isn't the religious nuts, the problem is the big uncertainty
about the future.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 14:45:09 MST