At 05:59 PM 7/21/01 +1000, Russell Blackford wrote:
>>Making provision in the old-fashioned way,
>>and inculcating the personal values appropriate to the frontier or the
>>1930s or 1950s, looks totally pointless in a world we expect to see
>>transformed exponentially during the immediate decades ahead.
>I think this is an exaggeration. [...] I'm comforted that I'll have some
>money available to spend on new medicines and so on during what I think is
>going to be a long transitional period before we can reverse ageing, upload,
>inload, etc.
Yes, indeed; as I said:
< if the singularity takes a comparatively slow
ramp up to an unforeseeable transcendence, it'd make sense to sock away a
lot of money now in order to buy incremental improvements--life extension
drugs and surgery, like that. >
But really what I'm addressing is the issue Lee raised: the social merits
of (as I paraphrased it, perhaps unfairly) `inculcating the personal values
appropriate to the frontier or the 1930s or 1950s'. That is a broader
social issue, which could only take effect over the next couple of decades.
I'm saying that with the Spike on the way (which, granted, you dispute) we
probably don't have time--and, more to the point, that subsidizing the
incompetent poor at the risk of ruining their moral fiber is a chance worth
taking, since their moral fiber will be toast anyway.
Damien Broderick
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