From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Tue May 25 1999 - 05:36:07 MDT
"Raymond G. Van De Walker" <rgvandewalker@juno.com> writes:
> On 24 May 1999 17:12:41 +0200 Anders Sandberg <asa@nada.kth.se> writes:
> >Our most important objective media-wise
> >right now is to make transhumanism a respectable perspective, and not
> >just something that can be dismissed as fringe or unsupported.
>
> Just an ignorant question here. Do any of you have specific ideas
> for preventing an interspecific war of extermination between
> transhumans of different species, or between humans and transhumans?
Rationality. Why would species A want to get rid of species B (costly
and dangerous), when they can instead trade or cooperate and both get
the benefits? I have a half-written paper about this issue, and it
seems that even wastly different transhuman species or
humans-transhumans have little to gain by attacking each other due to
things like the law of comparative advantage, the stability or
reciprocal cooperation and the likeliehood of having very different
ecological niches. As long as the number or impact of irrational
agents is sufficiently low and there are no "dominant technologies"
that give the wielder total dominance over any non-wielder, this seems
to be stable.
> It seems to me that the simplest way is to prevent human speciation,
> but I'm willing to be surprised.
Lack of speciation has never hindred intraspecies wars. But it is
notable that democracies never seem to go to war against each other.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 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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