From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Mon Feb 18 2002 - 12:01:38 MST
"Dickey, Michael F" wrote:
>
> Just curious what other extropians think of this - Mike
>
> http://lifeboat.com/
>
> Welcome to The Lifeboat Foundation! Our goal is to save the human race from
> extinction. Why do we think the human race will become
> extinct later this century? Because advanced technologies available by about
> 2020 will enable one evil or simply clumsy person to
> destroy all life on earth.
Hm. This doesn't work for the main issue of the Singularity, getting to terms
with transhuman intelligence, but it might enable a small crew to survive the
two major problems (military nanotech, engineered viruses) most likely to
spike our chances of getting to that point. I've been wishing for "second
chance at the Singularity" lifeboats for a few years, though I've been calling
them "survival stations", but I figured that it was an enormous capital
expenditure for a relatively small increment of species survival probability,
and hence not an optimal use of available resources unless annualized
planetary direct-to-Singularity funding creeps up into the $10 billion range.
Which seems unlikely, short of a massive global surge in intelligence.
-- -- -- -- --
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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