Re: Relinquish JXTA

From: Brian Atkins (brian@posthuman.com)
Date: Fri Apr 27 2001 - 20:53:10 MDT


hal@finney.org wrote:
>
> Joy has thus put his personal and financial self-interest ahead of
> his philosophical beliefs. He has compartmentalized his mind so that
> he can be the wise philosopher one day, raising cautionary notes about
> technology, while he can be the profitable technologist the next, making
> money for himself and his company (he is a major Sun stockholder).
>
> I'd like to see these contradictions made more obvious. Wouldn't it
> be great if there were a high-profile project to use Joy-the-engineer's
> JXTA for exactly those technologies which give Joy-the-philosopher the
> greatest concerns? Let's see him get up and play pundit once he is
> exposed as a hypocrite.
>
> Any suggestions for good projects along these lines?
>

I don't think you need to launch an actual project to get the effect you
want- maybe some experienced social engineers like RTMark could set up
a bogus site claiming to use JXTA to enable an unFriendly AI, or even
something more pedestrian like having a distributed project to calculate
the physics required for generating a portable nuclear weapon or some
new biowarfare agent. Then they go out and get a lot of publicity for
their stunt. There's enough irony there, that I bet you would eventually
get some decent attention, even if you launched it yourself and just got
it spread around a bit by underground publications.

-- 
Brian Atkins
Director, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
http://www.singinst.org/



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