Lee Daniel Crocker wrote:
>
> > Planning ahead for more than, say, 50 years is probably a waste of
> > time. Planning ahead for more than a century is utterly absurd.
> > By that time we'll all be dead or ascended.
>
> Such statements are religious eschatology, not rational argument.
> I may not be surprized if such an event comes about, and I might
> even consider some part of it likely, but I don't think I or most
> people here consider it that inevitable in that short a term.
I disagree. It's entirely rational-argument to say that the probability of life as we know it continuing for fifty years is of such negligible order that it need not be entered into our calculations. I disagree, but solely because of the possibility that a nuclear war takes us back two hundred years; if I saw a way to influence the relative post-catastrophe rates of climb-back in AI and nanotechnology, I'd use it. Other than that, den Otter is essentially correct.
--
sentience@pobox.com Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
http://pobox.com/~sentience/tmol-faq/meaningoflife.html
Running on BeOS Typing in Dvorak Programming with Patterns
Voting for Libertarians Heading for Singularity There Is A Better Way