[ExI] Consequentialist world improvement

[Charlie Stross]

On 10 Oct 2012, at 16:35, Keith Henson <hkeithhenson at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On the other hand, it is related to a discussion between Hans Moravec
> and me in the pre-archive days.  I eventually located it on a floppy
> disk.   Hans was arguing that he didn't need to be frozen since he
> could be resurrected from his works.  That led to me saying it would
> be a huge waste of computer resources and would involve discarding
> large numbers of versions of Hans that didn't get _Mind Children_
> exactly right and hoping the discard process would not be painful.

Obligatory fictional treatment of that idea: "Newton's Wake" by Ken MacLeod.

> BTW Charlie, I think Economics 2.0 is already upon us.
> 
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^
> 
> This might sound like total nonsense, except we can already see the
> beginnings of serious economic concerns with the speed of light. The
> avatars that run programmed trading must be close physically to the
> computers that run the stock exchanges.

Yeah, I've been a bit worried about that, too. And the effect of HFT and algorithmic trading on our markets. The animated graph here is positively terrifying:

http://www.nanex.net/aqck/2804.HTML



-- Charlie