[extropy-chat] My Dilemma

BillK pharos at gmail.com
Thu Jul 6 10:13:57 UTC 2006


On 7/6/06, Eugen Leitl wrote:
> I find vindicating technical progress by killing people and destroying
> infrastructure morally abhorrent.
>
> Besides, the motivations and capabilities of intelligent technologies
> to come out of military lab are most likely to produce a Singularity
> a la SkyNet. I'm not sure "saving millions of lives" would be the result...
>

'Morally abhorrent' is irrelevant. (But nice to know).

All the wonderful stuff that we now take for granted came out of the
huge WWII R&D projects.  It would all probably have arrived eventually
at a much more leisurely pace, but the frantic wartime effort produced
it all within about a decade.

I am in no way supporting or trying to justify the Iraq war. Just
pointing out that the heat of this wartime development will have more
wonders available to us in five or ten years. We will, of course, once
again take these wonders for granted at the same time as regretting
all the wartime death and injuries.

We regret the 40,000 road deaths every year in USA, but it doesn't
stop us taking advantage of cars without trying to severely control or
restrict them so as to minimise road deaths and injuries.

BillK



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