<br><br><div><span class="gmail_quote">On 10/31/06, <b class="gmail_sendername">Lee Corbin</b> <<a href="mailto:lcorbin@rawbw.com">lcorbin@rawbw.com</a>> wrote:</span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
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<div><font face="Courier New" size="2">But what happened to *me* in
there? I'm more than my memes, pal.</font></div>
<div><font face="Courier New" size="2">Don't forget my memories.</font></div></div></blockquote><div><br>Well memories are memes and at least some of them are essential components of the survival and reproduction processes. (Think of being a teenager and how many strategies you tried before you got some booty...)
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That's me, maybe. I don't want to "become", especially if
the end </font></div>
<div><font face="Courier New" size="2">product is not me. I would
rather "are". As you put it.</font></div></div></blockquote><div><br>Then you will be fighting a continual and probably eventually lose the battle. I have yet to see a strategy that guarantees avoidance of the external hazard function. For many the breaking point will be the decisions involving when and how to upload. For others it may be managing the "self"-collective after uploading. The problem is deciding when losing some part of oneself (some genes, reproduction behaviors, ones tribe, some ideas, etc.) constitutes "no longer surviving". For some it involves the "destruction" of memes derived from very old books programmed into them before they ever learned how to *think* about them.
<br><br>Lord forbid that animals simply like to "do it" (even if they sometime get the target wrong -- for one of my mother's dogs it was her leg). The 'perfect' omnipotent sysadmin would never have designed such a messed up system!
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Secondly, if the Singularity tarries, there
won't be any people,</font></div>
<div><font face="Courier New" size="2">me or like </font><font face="Courier New" size="2">me either one, you or like you, <font face="Times New Roman">
<strong>seņor </strong></font><font face="Courier New">Bradbury. </font></font></div>
<div><font face="Courier New" size="2"><em><font face="Times New Roman" size="3">La
ilaha ila Allah; Muhammadur-rasul Allah. </font></em></font></div></div></blockquote><div><br>I've been thinking a lot about inertia. I like to remember there are many more people leaning towards the saner primary meme frameworks than the less sane frameworks. I'm not sure you could say that rational frameworks are dominant yet but the populations leaning that way do outnumber and carry significantly more throw weight than those leaning in the other direction [1].
<br><br>The trick will be to shift things so ones near term survival interests that tend to trump the more ethereal "promises". Also bear in mind -- because the singularity will crunch a significant fraction of those ideas attached to entities people believe themselves to be a faster singularity (one which exceeds the rate of people adapting) could end up causing much more death and destruction compared with a slower one.
<br><br>The human social and political components are the least well understood parts of Kurzweil's "Law of Accelerating Returns". "We", for the most part, haven't even started the discussion of how fast we should go. I tend to be more worried about a backlash against the Singularity than it not arriving soon enough.
<br><br>Robert<br><br>1. E.g. Korea, Japan, Taiwan, China, Thailand, much of Russia & India, AU, NZ, Canada, a large fraction of Europe, the blue states in the U.S., some significant parts of Africa (usually S. of the equator) .
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