[extropy-chat] Bluff and the Darwin award.

[Keith Henson]

At 08:06 AM 5/16/2006 +0100, Russell Walla wrote:
>On 5/16/06, John K Clark <<mailto:jonkc at att.net>jonkc at att.net> wrote:

snip

>>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 -

Once you have said that the AI/nanotech singularity will happen at all, I 
don't see you being in a significantly different class than those who say 
it will happen "soon."

>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.

I agree it is hopeless to draw up a *government enforced* policy.  Consider 
the Web/Internet.  That simply happened faster than the government could 
formulate policy.  There are reasons to expect that the last stages of the 
run up are going to be much faster.

But there were/are all sorts of technical policies set up that became the 
standard for the Net and Web.  Some of them perhaps not as good as they 
could have been, but there are times when some standard is better than none.

In really broad brush now is the time to think about the relations we would 
like the AI "gods" and human uploads to have with whatever is left of the 
physical world and the people in it.

Incidentally, the consequences of the singularity not being "soon" are 
rather dire, the death of a large part of the world's population in wars 
and other events driven by too many people and too few resources.

Keith Henson