From: Aaron McBride (amcbride@jps.net)
Date: Thu Jan 24 2002 - 22:30:47 MST
I'd just like to make a point on this.
I'm not sure that "Eternal Life!" should be a feature of the singularity
that we should be pushing to the general public. From my experience the
majority of the general public who is interested in Eternal Life already
subscribe to a religion that grantees it, and would probably see the
singularity as "the work of the devil", "distracting them from Eternal Life
with God", etc... etc...
There's also a segment of the population who doesn't want to live forever
"trapped in a computer." You can try explaining to them until you're blue
in the face that life in a computer will be more
interesting/diverse/rich/fun/etc... but there's a good chance that they
won't be convinced.
It would be more productive to tell people that after the singularity, they
will be able to chose the time of their death (although some may see that
as forced suicide, and therefore evil). I was just talking to a friend
about death today. He said that it wasn't death that bothered him the
most, he was more concerned with growing old, not being able to be active,
getting sick, etc... We can tell those people that they won't grow old,
they won't feel the pain of arthritis, etc...
-Aaron
At 10:02 PM 1/24/2002 -0500, you wrote:
>Sorry, I don't see how a meme that has "Singularity! Eternal Life! AI!"
>posted all over it could be entirely useless for acheiving the Singularity.
>I also think some folks are suffering from undue paranoia and distrust of the
>public. I don't think the universe is built to allow us to all die out, its
>just a question of *when* we take this next step in evolution, not *if*. I
>never had any intention of exploiting mental flaws in people, I just have a
>desire to communicate the Singularity meme to people on *their* level.
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