From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@www.aeiveos.com)
Date: Wed Aug 04 1999 - 04:06:10 MDT
> Damien Broderick <d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au> wrote:
> At 02:16 PM 4/08/99 +1000, Emlyn (and possibly his `misses') wrote:
>
> >Thanks Jason, this is my favourite post in a while.
>
> Yeah, but doesn't it make you seethe not to be part of the A-list? I mean,
> Jeez, I thought those goddamned ET AIs would have mentioned me by name,
> after everything I've done for them.
>
> Damien Broderick
After all *you've* done for them?!? Well you hardly mention them
in "The Last Mortal Generation". Maybe 4 pages max. Perhaps there
is more in "The Spike" but I haven't read it yet. They clearly got
it wrong in "Beyond Humanity", and Moravec doesn't take it far enough
(he seems to imply there will be lots of separate AIs when clearly
making the computronium as dense as possible wins from the perspective
of minimizing propagation delays). Now *I* on the other hand have
dedicated 2 full years of my life to whipping the J-Brain musings
and Anders' foundation into a real theory about ET AIs. [Of course,
that isn't worth much if I get the full 69,315 you promise! BTW,
where is my warranty certificate for that?]
Now Eric, Ralph, Josh, Anders, Dyson and Kardashev I understand.
I conceived an "alien nano-guide" idea a couple of months ago
when I was musing on how very fast these people are and how clearly
they can see the trees in the forrest. Max is a definite possibility
but he is very low key about it. Perhaps he is from the other
side of the galaxy. I might accept Drake because he actually
posed the question of what happens when civilizations can extend
their lifespans in a little read article in MIT's Tech. Review
many years ago. Horowitz might make the cut since he finally is
doing optical SETI (which won't work unless we happen to orbit
into the line-of-sight on an ET AI comm channel). His ETAI uplink
must be running to a distant galaxy.
Robert Freitas should definately be on the list.
I'm withholding judgement on De Garis.
Almost everybody else however (esp. the Omega Point people and
the people who still think radio-SETI will work) are clueless.
They could be alien nano-guides, but *only if* they are here
to throw us off the track. Perhaps they are from the "evil"
ETAI who want to keep us down long enough for their massive fuel
tanker to arrive to consume the sun. If that is true then
the REJADK/ERAJDK/DKERAJ (don't you just hate it when you
can't come up with a good acronym...) must be from the
benevolent ETAI association.
And finally a minor rant on wormhole/shmurmhole, strings,
etc. -- *NO MAGIC PHYSICS* -- (I'm going to get a bumper
sticker made up for it) which I henceforth will abbreviate
to NMP (if I happen to encounter long discussions of such
topics).
Now, I realize that many of you enjoy discussing these things
and that is all fine and good for entertainment. But as
Eugene points out (re: cryonics) and others have pointed
out in other areas, there is real work to be done. We
need programs to do Assemblers@Home & Uploading@Home.
Clearly we could use more energy devoted to engineering
we can do now and less energy devoted to things that ETAIs
are better at understanding than we will ever be. After
all -- people are dying now *and* you're life may depend on it.
Robert
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