From: Alan Grimes (alangrimes@starpower.net)
Date: Sun Jan 27 2002 - 15:05:54 MST
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky 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.
Which cannot possibly be divorced from the actual humans.
O
/|\ < Human.
/ \
> I'll be deeply saddened if a majority or even a substantial minority of
> six billion people choose to voluntarily die,
I don't intend to die...
That's what my nanites are for. =)
> but the human path is to the stars, and whoever follows that path is
> the "human universe".
Uh whatever...
I don't doubt that should my life procede as I would hope I would, at
one point, undertake an interstelar journey.
If it takes 100,000 years to move a space station ten lightyears, so be
it...
> Not to mention, of course, that uploads potentially live a much faster
> timescale and,
I don't see any value in this notion.
> 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.
In Diaspora, The robots (whom I won't bother trying to spell) left earth
before the polises.
I would grant the robots some claim to humanity, though not the entities
in the polises.
> 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.
Or so you would hope.
> But once that choice is made, the human universe moves on, regardless
> of what percentages are involved.
You can't have it both ways.
You can't both claim to be human and be an upload. As much as your ego
would like to hold on to the old comfortable blanket of "human" in his
cold hard Cray, wishing won't make it so. You will have to create a new
essence to match your existance.
> 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.
The problem with your conceptualization is that there is no "diaspora"
Only a single streight line of evolution that never branches.
Transhumanity does not hinge on the acceptance of any one single
technology. The world would be horrible if that were the case., rather I
would hope to see many uppon many visions of transhumanity be explored.
The mere existance of a superior race does not deprive a single human of
his personal potential, his future, or the meaning he finds in his own
life.
Finally, the statement you make about these things being contingient
uppon the acceptance of _YOUR_ future indicates a profound sense of
being left out of mainstream humanity. I must say I sympathize but at
the same time I don't allow my ego to drive me to pronounce that my own
personal prefferances ammount to the manafest destiny of humanity
exclusive of all others.
> Just because everything is a matter of choice doesn't mean
> that some choices aren't blatantly wrong.
That is the aditude I fear.
Despite all your smiling papers on Friendly AI, this aditude coupled
with your unrestrained ego may quickly lead you to overwrite much of
what you said in that paper about forced uploading.
I suppose I see a lot of the same in Linux users who insist that they
are using the one true OS when infact it is among the worst I have come
across. They continue on to say that I am somehow inferior for not
jumping at the chance at working ten times as hard to get the same level
of service I get from my DOS/WIN3.11 setup.
-- DOS LIVES! MWAHAHAHAHA http://users.rcn.com/alangrimes/ <my website.
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