From: Eugen Leitl (eugen@leitl.org)
Date: Sun Jun 16 2002 - 10:58:52 MDT
On Sun, 16 Jun 2002, Gordon Worley wrote:
> First off, attachment to humanity is a bias that prevents rational
> thought. I and others have broken this attachment to keep it from
First off, attachment to your life is a bias that prevents rational
thought.
> clouding our thinking. It is the result of being genetically related
Logic is a pretty flower that smells bad, eh?
> to the rest of humanity, where the death of all human genes is a big
> enough problem to cause a person to give up a goal or die to save
> humanity. This kind of thinking, usually, is good because it keeps
> the average person from thinking it's okay to blow up Earth. This
> same kind of thinking, though, can be bad if it makes us overly
> cautious and Luddites.
You of course realize that if it blows up into your face, you're one of
the first to go. Does this factor anywhere figure in your equation?
> Some of us, myself included, see the creation of SI as important enough
> to be more important than humanity's continuation. Human beings, being
I hope you don't mind, but if you honestly think that, and you have a
nonzero chance of succeeding in most people's value system you've just
earned the privilege to be either incarcerated in maximum security for
life, or killed on sight, whatever comes first. (In case there are doubts
to above, I don't mind executing you in person. Okay?)
> self aware, do present more of an ethical delima than cows if it turns
> out that you might be forced to sacrifice some of them. I would like to
> see all of humanity make it into a post Singularity existence and I am
> willing to help make this a reality.
Either you're logically inconsistent, or you don't give a flying f*ck
about your life, and that of billions your peers, or both.
I'm not overly surprised that such attitudes exist (random noise gave us
both Einstein and J. Dahmer), and in fact I've heard Moravec being accused
of having said something similiar in person, but I hope you don't mind
that we reserve a special circle in hell for those with broken
empathy-circuits.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jul 17 2013 - 04:00:39 MDT