[ExI] Fwd: [Cosmic Engineers] Re: Sharing/engineering proposal

[Keith Henson]

On Fri, Oct 15, 2010 at 5:21 PM, Ben Zaiboc <bbenzai at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Keith Henson <hkeithhenson at gmail.com> wrote:
> ...
>
>> Ben, I am not really pouring cold water on your ideas,
>> which are very
>> much in tune with those discussed on the early extropian
>> list.  But I
>> do urge caution.
>
> Of course.
> I was responding to the implication that remaining biological might be better than uploading, which many people, including me, think is ludicrous.

"Better" is a tricky thing to evaluate in this context.  I think it s
nearly certain that the uploaded state will be more attractive, if not
we modify the unloaded environment till it is.  I expect the
attractiveness to seduce people out of the real world as in The Clinic
Seed story.  Once the population starts cocooning up, the process
might run to completion or near completion in a couple of years.

It might be a very strange world, houses well maintained by
AI/robots/bioforms even but no people visible in it.

On the other hand, a body kept up by increasingly capable nano
machines might be enough to keep people in the physical world.

> Not that I think there wouldn't be problems to deal with as an upload.  I'm banking on there being equivalents to linux, firefox, noscript, adblock and optimisegoogle for uploads, not to mention uploadgreasemonkey and uploadstaythehelloutofmyneocortex, and I'm sure that writing your own exoself software will be a popular, and perhaps essential, occupation.

As a guess you are one of the people who recompiles linux just because you can.

> Maybe, in the future, the price of freedom will be the willingness and ability to eternally rewrite your own systems software.  Even so, it's better than being made of meat, imo.

If that's what's required the vast majority of people will stay in meat.

Running on beta software would be really scary.

Keith

> Ben Zaiboc