[extropy-chat] Re: Transhumanist short story

[Jeff Medina]

On 8/14/05, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky <sentience at pobox.com> wrote:
> I'm in a competitive mood today, so here's a transhumanist zen parable:
> 
> 

On September 21st, 1980, I attempted to transmit my transhumanist
success story of length ln(-1)/pi, thus gaining a transient victory in
this eternal struggle. The subsequent quest to discover a keyboard
character set capable of encoding it is another story, difficult to
tell in its own way; living through it shucked the heart from my
shell. Homer honored the lost well.
The servo in my third chamber (of all places!) hums uncomfortably at
the sight of cephalopods, and to this day I can't get the character
set to stop transmitting my e-mails to the entangled sube rice straw
scrolls of a young Minamoto Yoritomo, much to his and my frustration.

[When Jeff tried to think of writing a zen parable precisely half as
long as Eliezer's, he popped out of existence. It is unclear to me who
was left to write this.]

-- 
Jeff Medina
http://www.painfullyclear.com/

Community Director
Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
http://www.singinst.org/

Relationships & Community Fellow
Institute for Ethics & Emerging Technologies
http://www.ieet.org/

School of Philosophy, Birkbeck, University of London
http://www.bbk.ac.uk/phil/