Anders Sandberg wrote,
> The trick is to make it uneconomical to produce anything that may have
> very bad long term effects, for example by having to pay a
> compensation. The producer would be motivated to make the risk smaller
> than the potential profit. Then we might need to think about some fine
> tuning so that we get a good safety margin and can deal with
> short-term companies ("In today's fluid goo market, this company won't
> be around in five years - it will have become something else by
> then. So I don't have to worry about mutations in my nanites over that
> timespan.")
That reminds me of an interesting article about the function of evolution in
the market:
Charles Darwin holds key to junk telecom bonds-Salomon
NEW YORK, Dec 12 (Reuters) - Investors in battered junk-rated
telecommunications bonds may be able to achieve equity-like returns by
taking a
page from Charles Darwin and investing in the "fittest" of bonds, Salomon
Smith
Barney said in a report on Tuesday.
"It will be 'survival of the fittest' in competitive telecom," Salomon
wrote. "Bad markets do not last forever, and as these companies continue to
show operations and financial improvement, their values will improve as
well"
http://www.mediacentral.com/channels//allnews/12_12_2000.reutr-story-N126689
37.
html
Stay hungry,
--J. R.
3M TA3
"If you go back a hundred years," he explains, "one of the biggest
scientific questions was 'what is life?' And one of the most prominent
theories had to do with vitalism--some substance, some thing that is
transmitted from cell to cell, animal to animal, that is the essence of
life. Well, you don't hear anybody talking about vitalism anymore. We've
come far enough to see all the mechanics--we've seen how DNA works, we've
seen all the pieces of the cell, and we don't have need for a hypothesis
like vitalism." So it will go, Sejnowski suspects, with consciousness.
(Phlogiston, incidentally, refers to a theoretical substance that people
once sought in combustible material, thinking it made up the "substance" of
fire.)
<http://www.doubletwist.com/news/columns/article.jhtml;$sessionid$WLUGKNIAAA
5EBWBCHIVSFEQ?section=weekly01&name=weekly0130>
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