From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Sun Jan 27 2002 - 13:40:03 MST
Alan Grimes wrote:
>
> > That said, I hope for your sake that given time and education you can
> > overcome your fear of uploading and join the rest of the human
> > universe.
>
> UNBELEIVABLE!!
> I think I have just witnessed an ego massive enough to distort time and
> space enough to turn a proportion ammounting to less than half a
> percentage of the general population to "everybody but Alan Grimes and
> the few crackpots who agree with him."
*Shrug*. The human universe goes where the destiny of humanity goes.
I'll be deeply saddened if a majority or even a substantial minority of
six billion people choose to voluntarily die, but the human path is to the
stars, and whoever follows that path is the "human universe". Not to
mention, of course, that uploads potentially live a much faster timescale
and, ergo, may well constitute a majority of the human universe in a very
short time even if only a million people on all Earth choose to follow the
human pathway out to the stars. But my point is that it doesn't matter.
Unlike most past choice points, such as the divergence of humanity from
the ape line, who gets to participate in the Singularity is a matter of
pure personal choice and not wealth or genetics. But once that choice is
made, the human universe moves on, regardless of what percentages are
involved. And whoever chooses to stay behind is no longer a
pre-Singularity human, which is to say a creator of the future and a
potential transhuman, but is rather an obsolete remnant, with no destiny
and no potential, leading an entirely meaningless life, unless and until
that person decides to join the rest of the human universe. Just because
everything is a matter of choice doesn't mean that some choices aren't
blatantly wrong.
Or so I see it. Others are welcome to their opinion.
-- -- -- -- --
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://intelligence.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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