[ExI] is a FTL drive a dream without any physics to back it up?

[Stefano Vaj]

On 18 December 2011 09:54, Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se> wrote:

> The problem with collapses is that they are likely triggers of existential
> risk, and that low-tech states might be very persistent. We spent hundreds
> of thousands of years as hunter-gatherers, and for those many thousands of
> years we were agriculturalists technological progress was fairly spotty.
> During low-tech states the species is much more vulnerable to exogenous
> existential risks like climate, supervolcanos and disease.
>

I agree. OTOH, I am not sure about the persistence of low-tech states.
NeoLuddites themselves are "pessimistic" upon the fact that any state
barely compatible with survival allows for a rapid bounce-back, if not in
terms of wealth , at least in terms of access to information and know-how.
Even those who, eg, adhere to a strictly cyclical vision of history
recognise that memory of past cycles does not really get lost and
influences subsequent cycles.

The fundamental paradox is that the kind of technology that would help us
> reduce existential risk a lot - molecular manufacturing, AI, brain
> emulation - also poses existential risks. Powerful tools are risky. So
> depending on where you think the balance lies, you will want to make some
> of these happen before the other ones.
>

The question nevertheless remains - dangerous for what?

-- 
Stefano Vaj
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