[extropy-chat] Bluff and the Darwin award.

[Russell Wallace]

On 5/16/06, John K Clark <jonkc at att.net> wrote:
>
> Russell Wallace  Wrote:
>
> >any regulations [on Nanotechnology] we might invent now would ultimately
> >prove about as useful as Roger Bacon trying to draw up restrictions on
> the
> >manufacture of nerve gas.
>
> That is a good line, that is a damn good line, it's so good I intend to
> steal it.


Thanks! Sure, go ahead.

Unfortunately the rest of your post was not as good. Your argument
> seems to be that the Singularity idea can't be true because if it were
> then
> someday things would be odd; well, as far as I know there is no law of
> physics that says things can't be odd.
>

Not quite. I criticize only the idea of the Singularity being around the
corner. I said the idea of it coming to pass sometime in the distant future
is a fine one - there's certainly nothing to say things won't someday become
odd. My point is that if it does, it will have to be sufficiently far off
and in a world sufficiently odd to begin with, that we can't predict it with
any sort of accuracy, so any attempt to draw up Singularity policy in 2006
will be worse than useless.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20060516/4f453b4f/attachment.html>