[ExI] Private and government R&D

[Stefano Vaj]

On Mon, Jun 29, 2009 at 7:41 PM, Dan<dan_ust at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I agree preferences play a role here.  I'm not sure anyone disagreed with that.  But the point is whose preferences and who pays the bill.  In any system, coercive or voluntary, there will be demands and the system will have ways of meeting those demands.  It seems to me that a voluntary system works better because each person has an effective and efficient way of making her or his demands felt.

What I am trying to say, also to keep myself out of a debate which has
"religious" subtones and is not really likely to be resolved here, is
that whatever the respective efficiency of any conceivable system,
none of them can guarantee the desidered outcome by definition.

In fact, if the "market" refuses, or is indifferent to,
transhumanism-relevant techs, cultural products, arts, services, or,
even more probably, the fundamentals which are are required for them
to happen, etc., the market laws are still respected, and whatever
their "efficiency" may be, it still does not bring us anywhere.

An entirely different question is whether the "market" is the most
suitable tool to see them developed - which may well be the case,
depending on the circumstances.

But for me, being firstly and above all a transhumanist, *not* a
libertarian or a socialist, this is a purely technical issue, to be
resolved on empirical grounds, more or less as the issue of whether to
get our energy from space-based solar satellites or from tokamaks or
both, so that I do not care much for advocating one thing or another
on "principled" grounds.

-- 
Stefano Vaj