From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Tue May 21 2002 - 16:54:30 MDT
"Christian L." wrote:
>
> I'm curious about this statement. My gut feeling is that the military would
> consider research aimed at the Singularity as something potentially very
> *harmful* to the nation. If the research is successful, it would mean the
> END of the government and the military. My feeling is also that there are a
> great deal of narrow minded people in the government/military sector, who
> perhaps are afraid of such a massive upheaval.
I don't think that military officers - US military, at least - are that
evil. If they misinterpreted a Singularity project as a threat to the US
and the world, then yes, they wouldn't take it well, as is only natural. I
think that if the typical officer in the US military saw a real chance of
ending war forever, they would see this as a *very* good thing, not a career
threat. To the extent that people are narrow-minded, they are likely to
miss out on the possibility of a real upheaval entirely, seeing the whole
issue in terms of an ordinary technological revolution instead.
-- -- -- -- --
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://intelligence.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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