From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Sun Jun 23 2002 - 08:16:52 MDT
Ben Goertzel wrote:
>
> No, I did not and do not claim this.
>
> I merely presented this as my best intuitive guess. I attach a fairly
> low confidence to this guess of mine.
>
> One of my reasons for putting forth this guess is because it seems to me
> this possibility is generally ignored.
>
> Instead, people tend to focus on various options in which Powers are
> closely engaged with humans: either helping us as our Gods, or seeking to
> exterminate us.
Ben, it is extremely unlikely that Powers would attempt to exterminate us
deliberately. But Eugen is perfectly correct in that indifference very
probably equates to extermination.
> I don't know what's gonna happen, and neither does any other human....
Not an excuse for ignoring whatever scraps of evidence you can scrape up.
If you choose to be uncertain then the center and distribution of your
uncertainty volume will end up being even more indefensible than whatever
conclusion you wanted to avoid. You can't avoid having an opinion just by
being uncertain.
-- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://intelligence.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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