[ExI] Uploading and shocking statements (Re: a dispassionate etc.)

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> From: Alan Grimes<agrimes at speakeasy.net>
>
> What a shocking statement! At first I was about to pick it apart like I
> normally do but then I quickly became overwhelmed by how disgustingly
> pathetic a mentality must be in order to think such a thing! Can I even
> be reading you right that you are cheerfully looking forward to
> accepting the tenuous existence within a cubic centimeter prison as a
> second class entity with utterly no opportunities for growth or long
> term survival?

No.  He's stating that to a sufficiently powerful entity, what you 
*want* does not make the slightest bit of difference.

The saber-toothed carnivores that depended on hunting mammoths and 
mastodons did not *want* to die out as a side effect of mammoths and 
mastodons being hunted to extinction by humans.  Yet they did.

Similarly, as Charles Stross correctly points out in "Accelerando," most 
of the characteristics that make us recognizably human would be 
competitive disadvantages on the other side of the Singularity, which 
will be dominated by entities without those constraints.  Perhaps we 
would be quarantined behind a firewall out of pity, and because it's 
trivially cheap for the dominant intelligences to do so.