Encouraging a Positive Transcension

From: Ben Goertzel (ben@goertzel.org)
Date: Tue Feb 10 2004 - 20:31:20 MST


Hi all,

Well, my kids really started getting on my case about the house being dirty,
so I spent all Friday cleaning house.

After all that torture, I was so fed up I had to do something relaxing, so I
spent part of the weekend and Monday writing an essay containing some of my
thoughts on ethics, the Singularity, and related topics. Friendly AI and
some other issues frequently discussed on this list are treated in some
depth.

The essay is called

"Encouraging a Positive Transcension: AI Buddha versus AI Big Brother,
Voluntary Joyous Growth, the Tao of Speciecide, and Other Issues in
Transhumanist Ethical Philosophy"

You can find it at

http://www.goertzel.org/papers/PositiveTranscension.htm

It was about 27 pages in Word -- not nearly enough to say everything I have
to say about the topic, so it's a bit too terse in parts; but alas, other
duties call...

It's a first draft, and there may be some bits and pieces of thinking in
there that appealed to me at the time of writing but won't appeal to me next
week. But the broad outlines of the ideas presented there have been in my
head for a long time, and many of them have popped up here and there in
discussions on this list.

-- Ben G



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