From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Tue Nov 25 1997 - 08:39:18 MST
"Berrie" <staring@worldonline.nl> writes:
> This "master" idea is exactly the thing which I find hard to take.
> Who will stay behind, and why ?
As things are going right now, I would not be the least surprised if
the Singularity affects a minority of all humans, the rest living
relatively normal lives in the shadow of Powers simply because they
couldn't adapt fast enough, didn't see what was coming, didn't care,
didn't have the money or just refused (there are a lot of people who
think our visions are actually horrible, remember that). Exponential
growth makes differences grow exponentially too.
> Won't there be some "magical" point of no return...
> You smart and won't do harm anymore.
> or your dumb, and can't do any harm................
Maybe, but my point still stands: we cannot be sure about this, and we
definitely should *not* rely on it. It is a very dangerous Polyanna
mentality.
Besides, this point may be at a very high power level, and we already
know that individuals with defective ethics (not to mention accidents)
can hurt a lot of people fairly easily, and as the power level
increases, the range of effects can be much larger. So while the IQ
5000 posthumans are utterly benign, the IQ 500 transhumans can be
somewhat nasty - and we have to pass that stage safely first.
What I want is to find a way to guarantee my, and hopefully others',
survival in the face of this uncertainty.
> Also: so earth goes........who cares....
> It's not that we don't have any ball's left ?
> I asked you this before: Anders you have to leave your cradle
> someday :-). What's so damn special about earth, except for
> the fact that we live on it :-)
Sentimentality. Besides, I'm a packrat who hates throwing away any
information that can someday be useful.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
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