You think that'll really matter to anyone off this list? I have heard during discussions, with a very, very lapsed, Roman Catholic, that monotheism is troublesome, because "..what if you piss-off the only god, then you have nobody else to turn to?.."
A very friendly Sysop may never be reverently worshipped; but on the other hand, people of our pre-Singularity ilk, may be so grateful, that worship may indeed occur, or veneration. We may end up being The Grateful Dead, with genuine reference to Master's Garcia and Weir.
The Jupiter Minds of a later era may chuckle at our foolishness, and well they may have a reason to. But our gratitude for goodies imagined by Transhumanist philosophers, may be sincere, all the more.
The Super-powered psychotic three year old you refer to, I remind you is what the Islamists, are very comfortable praying to, and murdering for. In a sense its not yours or mine to control, but whatever the ultimate mind or minds decide is necessary or desirable.
Maybe the Taleban will be written to file and forgotten about, dwelling in their Islamic paradises, sans Christians, Jews, Atheists, Buddhists, and Hindu's?
<<And there's no point at all in praying to a Friendly mind of any kind,
Sysop-level or otherwise; no Friendly mind would demand reverence or
obedience or faith or anything of the sort.
The division between rationality and thinking any damn thought that pops
into your head is valuable and dearly bought. So is the distinction
between technology and magic, or between a world of Similarity and
Contagion and a world of cause and effect. We shouldn't throw it away so
cheaply by casually conflating a Friendly superintelligence and a
psychotic superpowered three-year-old in the sky.
-- -- -- -- --
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence>>
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