From: Philip Sutton (Philip.Sutton@green-innovations.asn.au)
Date: Fri Feb 20 2004 - 18:56:09 MST
Ben,
> but my main complaint is that ..........
OK - I'll think more about the areas where you think I'm under-rating
problems or over-rating our (human) capacities for response.
> 2) you seem to vastly overestimate the reasonableness of the average
> human ... making statements like "If you want to Transcend but don't
> bother other people while doing so, no one is going to want to stop
> you" which flatly contradict the repressive nature of human governments
> and belief systems today, as manifested by many existing laws that
> cover "victimless crimes" and restrict free development of technology
> because of religiously-derived "ethical" proscriptions
There are some communities around the world that are not like the US -
and since we are genetically rather similar it suggests that many of the
problems you point to are intrinsic to human nature but are cultural and
institutional.
My fear is that if we actually turn our backs on working slowly (but as
fast as we can) to fix these cultural and institutional problems we
actually heat up the problem - the whole issue descend into who can get
their own AGI into play first so that they can take over the world first
and impose their own flavour of absolute-mind-control-driven
dictatorship.
For example, I'd recommend that the US get a democratic voting
system and put lots of money into education for the poorest sections of
society and getting the excessive influence of media moguls under
control before telling the rest of the world that humans (in general) are
too irrational to handle democracy. (Of course, as a citizen of Australia
a country that is running around like a US lap-dog and that launched
Rupert Murdock on the world - I need to take of my own advice!)
Cheers, Philip
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