> Damien Broderick <d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au> wrote:
> At 02:16 PM 4/08/99 +1000, Emlyn (and possibly his `misses') wrote:
>
> >Thanks Jason, this is my favourite post in a while.
>
> Yeah, but doesn't it make you seethe not to be part of the A-list? I mean,
> Jeez, I thought those goddamned ET AIs would have mentioned me by name,
> after everything I've done for them.
>
> Damien Broderick
After all *you've* done for them?!? Well you hardly mention them in "The Last Mortal Generation". Maybe 4 pages max. Perhaps there is more in "The Spike" but I haven't read it yet. They clearly got it wrong in "Beyond Humanity", and Moravec doesn't take it far enough (he seems to imply there will be lots of separate AIs when clearly making the computronium as dense as possible wins from the perspective of minimizing propagation delays). Now *I* on the other hand have dedicated 2 full years of my life to whipping the J-Brain musings and Anders' foundation into a real theory about ET AIs. [Of course, that isn't worth much if I get the full 69,315 you promise! BTW, where is my warranty certificate for that?]
Now Eric, Ralph, Josh, Anders, Dyson and Kardashev I understand. I conceived an "alien nano-guide" idea a couple of months ago when I was musing on how very fast these people are and how clearly they can see the trees in the forrest. Max is a definite possibility but he is very low key about it. Perhaps he is from the other side of the galaxy. I might accept Drake because he actually posed the question of what happens when civilizations can extend their lifespans in a little read article in MIT's Tech. Review many years ago. Horowitz might make the cut since he finally is doing optical SETI (which won't work unless we happen to orbit into the line-of-sight on an ET AI comm channel). His ETAI uplink must be running to a distant galaxy.
Robert Freitas should definately be on the list. I'm withholding judgement on De Garis.
Almost everybody else however (esp. the Omega Point people and the people who still think radio-SETI will work) are clueless. They could be alien nano-guides, but *only if* they are here to throw us off the track. Perhaps they are from the "evil" ETAI who want to keep us down long enough for their massive fuel tanker to arrive to consume the sun. If that is true then the REJADK/ERAJDK/DKERAJ (don't you just hate it when you can't come up with a good acronym...) must be from the benevolent ETAI association.
And finally a minor rant on wormhole/shmurmhole, strings, etc. -- *NO MAGIC PHYSICS* -- (I'm going to get a bumper sticker made up for it) which I henceforth will abbreviate to NMP (if I happen to encounter long discussions of such topics).
Now, I realize that many of you enjoy discussing these things and that is all fine and good for entertainment. But as Eugene points out (re: cryonics) and others have pointed out in other areas, there is real work to be done. We need programs to do Assemblers@Home & Uploading@Home. Clearly we could use more energy devoted to engineering we can do now and less energy devoted to things that ETAIs are better at understanding than we will ever be. After all -- people are dying now *and* you're life may depend on it.
Robert