From: Sampo Syreeni (decoy@iki.fi)
Date: Mon Aug 07 2006 - 04:55:52 MDT
On 2006-08-06, Joshua Fox wrote:
> Why do we not see among Singularitarians more psychiatrists,
> psychologists, anthropologists, historians, or biologists, all fields
> which are to some extent relevant to the Singularity?
My first guess would be that in most fields of knowledge other than
computer science, the subject of study is far more difficult to write
than to read. To someone with a background in von Neumann style
computing, the idea of treating all sufficiently strong computational
systems as interchangeable and then going on to reprogram them wholesale
comes rather naturally; to someone who's more used to slowly teasing out
the non-man-made invariants of physical or social interaction this
engineering perspective is probably not as accessible. Yet it is also
precisely what you need before you can start treating intelligence and
societal order as something amenable to conscious redesign and, so,
accelerating development.
> For that matter, why do we not see more doctors, non-high-tech
> business people, musicians, or practitioners of other unrelated
> professions, as we do for other movements?
In the above terms that would translate to the question of how a
write-oriented mindset could be acquired without exposure to computing
technology. Dunno in general, but I suspect that it's at least possible:
to me it seems that some socialist transhumanists have derived their
ideas largely from a social planning background, and not computers.
-- Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy - mailto:decoy@iki.fi, tel:+358-50-5756111 student/math+cs/helsinki university, http://www.iki.fi/~decoy/front openpgp: 050985C2/025E D175 ABE5 027C 9494 EEB0 E090 8BA9 0509 85C2
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