[ExI] ai is the easy road

[spike at rainier66.com]

-----Original Message-----
From: extropy-chat <extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org> On Behalf Of Ben
Zaiboc via extropy-chat


>>...  If religion creates a common basis for society, then diversity is our
weakness.  That view predicts the existence of multiple religions results a
reduction in cohesiveness of a society.

>...Ok, but I don't see how.
Why should irrational beliefs in impossible things act as a basis for
stabilising large groups, rather than something more concrete and
demonstrable? Ben

Ben my best guess on that is that religion confers an advantage for writing
and reading.  Consider three very successful religions of our times:
Judaism, Christianity and Islam.  All three are heavily dependent on the
written word.  Judaism is a huge collection of very complicated and
arbitrary rules, which really need the written word.

OK now the fun part.

In many ancient societies, leadership was hereditary, passed exclusively
thru the male line, not a meritocracy.  But now envision a very complicated
religion (such as Judaism) where the religious (and societal) leader is the
one who masters reading and writing.  Rather than pass the leadership to his
son (who might be a lazy moron) what if... the rabbi finds the most capable
young master of reading the religious texts, then rewards that guy by mating
him with the rabbi's daughter.  He passes leadership not to his son, but to
his son in law, who is the most capable reader and thinker. 

If that process goes on for enough generations, you eventually breed a group
of people who are masters reading, writing, perhaps math, people who will
pursue mastery of esoteric skills and knowledge just for its own sake.

Now...

Find a list of names of the top scientists who solved the most difficult and
urgent scientific problem of the early 1940s, at Los Alamos New Mexico.
What do most of those names have in common?  Why do they have that in
common?

spike