[extropy-chat] Futures Past

[Harvey Newstrom]

On Oct 9, 2005, at 11:28 AM, Alejandro Dubrovsky wrote:

> On Sun, 2005-10-09 at 10:12 -0400, Harvey Newstrom wrote:
>> accurately.  It was us!  Transhumanists are not any better at
>> predicting the future than others.  It is just that we err on the side
>> of overstated exuberance while others err on the side of pessimistic
>> extrapolation.
>>
> There is no we or us here.  Those predictions were mostly made by Greg
> Burch, a couple of people piped up with comments, and Greg took some of
> them onboard on his write up.  That is all.
> (I wish I would have written down some predictions, and I admire Greg's
> work ethic in actually going through with it and remembering to look
> them up after all these years afterwards.  But this is no lesson to
> anyone else unless you remember agreeing with those that wrote them)

No, I wasn't one of the people who agreed with these predictions.  But 
most people did.  You can review the archives if you don't believe me.  
These were not rare or odd predictions made by Greg.  It was convention 
transhumanist thought.  And it was wrong.  Today, there are still such 
predictions about AI and nanotech.  People are still expecting the 
singularity within a decade.  It simply won't happen.  Everybody will 
think I am too pessimistic now.  And then everyone will deny making 
these predictions 10 years from now.  I've been through it before, and 
I'll go through it again.

--
Harvey Newstrom <HarveyNewstrom.com>
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