From: Michael Lorrey (retroman@together.net)
Date: Wed Nov 26 1997 - 05:13:38 MST
Anders Sandberg wrote:
>
> 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.
Considering that the people most likely to transcend to posthuman states
are those most far to the right of the intellectual bell curve, and that
such people also tend to endure a large amount of persecution from
mundanes during childhood and adolescence, I think it highly likely that
at least one, if not many, of the first post humans will have highly
negative viewpoints towards mundanes, and extremely negative viewpoints
towards anti-tech and anti-intellectual idiots, which they would tend to
use their newfound powers to devise methods of a)eliminating such
morons, or b) using the technology to make such idiots forcibly into the
sort of people they once despised, thus achieving (a) without killing
anyone. Reactionaries will of course be on the opposite side, forming
terrorist insurgencies to oppose the transition. Anyone who thinks the
transcendant period will not be violently dynamic is living in a fools
paradise.
A good example is to compare how many conservative moslem countries have
reacted in recent years to the influx of progressive western
technologies, ideas, and ideals. The more extreme the distance between
the ends of a political/cultural axis, the more likely this dynamism
will turn to violence.
>
-- TANSTAAFL!!! Michael Lorrey ------------------------------------------------------------ mailto:retroman@together.net Inventor of the Lorrey Drive MikeySoft: Graphic Design/Animation/Publishing/Engineering ------------------------------------------------------------ How many fnords did you see before breakfast today?
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