[extropy-chat] How to be copied into the future?

[Robert Bradbury]

Hmmm... seems my comments may have stirred the pot so to speak.

Let me attempt to qualify.  With respect to wisdom vs. mercy... It was a
comment on how many more vectors could be saved if we had the wisdom to
pursue them.  For example, and this is not a comment on the war in Iraq, I'm
observing the fact that I estimated circa 2001 the cost of an assembly line
for a nanorobot at $3.6 trillion and considered this to be a sum one could
*never* extract from the "funding community" and yet I am witnessing us
spending $0.5 trillion on a war which makes little difference to the average
U.S. citizen.  If I had been "wise" I might have gone back and calculated
what we spent in WWII in current dollars and framed things in terms of costs
and benefits.  Little did I realize (in early 2001) how what in retrospect
was a "small" event [1] can reshape the operational context.

I do and will take a strong opposing position with respect to "mercy"
vectors that assume an afterlife which is not in evidence.  So the
Catholics, Protestants, Muslims and Buddhists are all toast (as their
current frameworks are justified to the best of my knowledge).  (If you can
lay out the proof that this is a sim and we are being judged before me I am
willing to look at the evidence.)

Now, all that being said, I am still wrestling with the slope of the
singularity.  If it develops very fast, as I suspect it might, the pre-KT-I
to KT-II level transition is very fast (within a human "generation").  More
importantly at the KT-II level, the resources required for a KT-I level are
insignificant.  One gains much more with an improvement to a computational
algorithm or architecture (even 0.01%) than one gains by turning Earth, Mars
or Venus into computronium.  So why bother with the fleas on the back of the
dog?

So the problem one has to wrestle with is not whether the wisdom vector or
the mercy vector produces results which translate into "redemption" but
whether or not "redemption" of "fleas" is worthy of notice by entities
focused on more important problems [2].

Robert

1. You can take down a couple of buildings and remove 0.001% of the
population but you are not significantly impacting the entity (other than to
really piss them off).  (As an FYI the daily U.S. death toll (due in large
part to aging) was/is more than double the 911 "event" death toll.  911 was
hardly a bump in the road other than the attention which was paid to it.)
2. I think a recent show on either the science channel or the discovery
channel indicated that our galaxy is going to collide with one of our sister
galaxies in ~3 billion years.  3 billion years is a relatively short time
span, esp. if we starlift the sun so it will last a trillion years or more.
During galactic collisions, one is less concerned with the survival of
"meat" vectors and more concerned with whether or not one gets sucked into
one of the black holes whose fundamental raison d'etre seems to be the
disassembly of organized forms of matter in the universe.
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