[ExI] RIP Singularitarianism

[Sondre Bjellås]

When I was young, I had dreams. When I was older, I had visions. Now, still
being young,  I keep realizing everything I want to do. There is little gain
in dwelling on the singularity, for a brief moment or two it’s ok, but I
wouldn’t want to keep an ongoing discussion with someone how it might come
to be and how it might manifest itself.

 

I have never been very active in transhuman discussions online, but I love
to chat with my friends and people that I meet. The best thing I can do for
another being is helping them to raise their own awareness.

 

There is no fear in my mind for the future, only fear for people who fall
behind and can’t keep up the tempo (one example is radical religious
people). But that is a minor itch on my back, cause there is nothing that
will stop evolution.

 

I believe that technological progress is too rapid for a philosophy to
survive for very long. Political systems fails to keep track of the society,
we are evolving into cyber-cultures that reach far beyond any government and
physical limits.

 

I live by two basic principles: Self-improvement and Experiences.

 

Whether I will experience “singularity” in whichever form before I die does
not matter, cause when I’m gone, I won’t care. Which makes me happy to think
about.

 

Until that day, I will continue to work on my robotics projects which one
day might turn medieval on my ass. 

 

Regards,

Sondre

 

From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org
[mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Russell Wallace
Sent: 20. juni 2007 09:23
To: ExI chat list
Subject: [ExI] RIP Singularitarianism

 

I was once a Singularitarian. I will not again go into the factual truths
and falsehoods associated with this belief system (those arguments have been
had many a time and oft), merely note that I once adhered to it as a system.


Why did I change? For factual reasons, by turning around and reexamining my
inventory of beliefs and discarding those that were not supported by
material reality, to be sure.

But also - and to the point - for moral reasons. Singularitarianism was once
a beacon of hope, to which a good man would be proud to subscribe. 

What went wrong? Well, it's late in the day. The meme pool is poisoned,
parasite-ridden. Fear and paranoia contaminate it on all sides.

And at the end of the day, what drove me to unsubscribe from the Singularity
list was that the most vocal contributors were and remained in a sphexish
loop that computers will spring out of basements and start devouring human
flesh and conquering the world. Over and over again, I don't mind arguing
against that nonsense once or twice, but when transmission volume is
directly proportional to fear and paranoia even - especially - among those
who claim to be technophiles, who should be forward drivers, when it is so
tireless that one wonders whether the primary contributors live under a
bridge, that they have no purpose in life than transmitting their parasitic
meme complexes... then one must bow out. 

We may live, break the bounds of time and space, become the seed for
sentience in this Hubble volume. Or we may die, strangled by our own fear
until real death comes for us. Either way, explicit Singularitarian work is
already dead, cf: SIAI, Novamente. All I can do is get on with my own
(non-Singularity) work. 

My point, though, is that there's a gap in meme space: anyone want to coin a
philosophy that means making actual progress, _no_ parasite memes admitted?

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