[extropy-chat] Futures Past

[Alejandro Dubrovsky]

On Sun, 2005-10-09 at 13:23 -0400, Harvey Newstrom wrote:
> On Oct 9, 2005, at 11:28 AM, Alejandro Dubrovsky wrote:
> > 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.  

I did.  Most people didn't say anything.  Silence does not equal
consent.  I can't find where you were doing some more pessimistic
predictions in that thread.  I can't find where I was making more
pessimistic predictions in that thread (I can't remember what I thought,
too easy to fool myself).  Neither of these mean that we agreed.

> These were not rare or odd predictions made by Greg.  It was convention 
> transhumanist thought. 

That's my point.  There isn't any conventional transhumanist thought
when it comes to timelines. 

>  And it was wrong.  Today, there are still such 
> predictions about AI and nanotech.  People are still expecting the 
> singularity within a decade.  

Some people are, some people aren't.  My feeling is that most people on
this list think this prediction will not come to pass.

> 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.

But you cop out in the same way I do:  where are your predictions?  what
do your expected timelines look like?  Most predictions are wrong, so
it's easy to be a naysayer, but technological progress has been made
since 1998 (I hope you agree), and this will continue (again, I assume
you agree with this too), so maybe you have thoughts about when certain
things will happen.  Quantify your pessimism by sharing your expected
timelines.