From: Ben Goertzel (ben@goertzel.org)
Date: Wed Aug 09 2006 - 19:12:40 MDT
> Oh sigh. It's very U.S.-centric to consider it the top dog in its class.
> I don't know what standards you want to use, but I wouldn't consider the
> U.S. the "best" country in any sense. I don't know that I ever have.
> Ditto the so-called growth of so-called fundamentalist religion. What do
> you use to justify this claim, and against what other periods of history
> are you comparing, and why are your samples reasonable?
Well, "best" sounds like a value judgment, which is inherently
qualitative, until some criteria are specified, of course...
But the post-WWII USA seems to me to have been the most intense and
productive nexus of technological and scientific progress in human
history.
The US is also of course "top dog" in purely economic terms; I believe
it's GNP is about 1/4 that of the global all together...
It is my guess that when a Singularity is launched, US-based
researchers and engineers are likely to have a lot to do with it.
There is more AI, nanotech and biotech going on here in the US than
anywhere else.... These are in my view (and that of Kurzweil and
others) the most important Singularity technologies. (Japan is
kicking our ass in robotics and consumer electronics, admittedly, but
I find these domains less Singularity-central....)
And I say this as a person who despises our current US President, who
personally preferred living in Australia and New Zealand to the US,
and who runs a company with nearly all its employees in Brazil ...
Perhaps this is not an SL4-relevant thread though. I think I'll snipe
myself, having said my patriotic little bit ;-)
-- Ben
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