[ExI] Isn't Bostrom seriously bordering on the reactionary?

[Stefano Vaj]

On 14 June 2011 18:55, Damien Sullivan <phoenix at ugcs.caltech.edu> wrote:

> What do you find reactionary in that?
>

I highlighted the parts that, "sensible" as they might be, look to say the
least ambiguous to my ears.

This is emphatically NOT presenting the case for innovation, technology, and
posthuman change.

This seems to me instead a mild, moderate presentation of the arguments on
which the precautionary principle is based, which is hardly in want of
advocates these days.

I think that as *citizens* it is only plausible and reasonable to have a
complex set of priorities, safety being amongst them (even though when naive
reference is made to "mankind" some deconstruction of the concept IMHO is in
order).

OTOH, as a *transhumanist* I think that it is not the role of a club for the
promotion of chess playing to discuss the benefits of outdoor sports or the
the counsel for the defence to present evidence against their clients or of
a lobbysts to keep in mind some higher good or of a trade union to find the
ideal composition of the workers and employers interests.

To take all that into consideration is the task of the community or of the
judge or the legislator, who are in the best possible position to do it when
they actually hear *both* unadulterated cases, both pros and cons, not just
more extreme and more moderate versions of the same, unidirectional,
arguments, where there things become quickly of a fractal nature, given that
we have position A but we do not really have position B, since position B
would like to be a compromise between position A and... itself in the first
place.

--
Stefano Vaj
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