[ExI] THE MIGHTY ORIGINAL

[John Clark]

This universal obsession with the original makes me wonder if it could be the result of an innate flaw in  our mental wiring; otherwise it's difficult to explain something like the persistent irrationality in the art market. People will happily pay 140 million dollars for an original Jackson Pollock abstract painting, but those same people wouldn't pay 5 dollars for a copy so good they couldn't tell the difference, a copy so good it would take a team of world class art experts many hours of close study to tell the difference; and even then the difference wouldn't be that one was better than the other, just that they had at last found a tiny difference between the two.

Up to now that sort of erroneous thinking hasn't caused enormous problems, it just led some rich men into making some very stupid purchases, but during the singularity that sort of dementia could become much more serious. Unless you can develop software fixes to mitigate the wiring errors in your head and put aside the Mighty Original dogma then you will be dog meat in the singularity. Well..., you probably will be anyway but at least you'll have a chance.

  John K Clark


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