Re: Privacy (was RE: FYI: MEDIA & Greenpeace

Eliezer Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Sat, 07 Dec 1996 19:14:36 -0600

> In all my dealings with others, I try to be as open and revealing of my
> inner most thoughts as possible. I reject totally the idea that "white lies"
> are OK. Furthermore, I have stated many times that my desire to be able to
> communuicate with fidelity what I am is so great (and I seem not be able to
> accomplish this by standard interpersonal methods), that I would very much
> welcome a human augmentation which would allow us all to transmit and receive
> each others thoughts. I have stated that if such an augmentation were possible,
> then I would volunteer to be the first to allow others to read his thoughts. I
> believe that it would (eventually) be a much less violent and generally better
> world, if everyone could read everyone else's conscious mind whenever they
> liked. (Although if instituted suddenly it might lead to more than half the
> world's population killing each other.)

If I had a choice, right now, of having my memories broadcast over the
entire planet or not, I would choose, without hesitation, to have them
broadcast.
If I had a choice, right now, of having my memory broadcast to a single
human selected at random, I don't think I would take it.

There are things in my mind that I would like everyone in the world to
know, and things that I wish to keep to myself. I would be willing to
sacrifice my privacy - or, for that matter, my life - to let everyone on
the planet know EVERYTHING I do in as much detail as I do. I am not
willing to sacrifice my privacy to give a single person that much; in
fact, I would not give a randomly selected person ANY of the
important/dangerous stuff, just Singularity-based ethics, evolutionary
psychology and some of the cognitive science - not much more than I've
already published/posted, although perhaps in much greater detail.

Again, that disclaimer is there for a reason.

It's a great question, though. Would *you* want your memories broadcast
all over the world? To a million random people? To a thousand? To a
single person? To the readers of this list? To the scientific
population of the world?

(Definitely yes, yes, no, definitely no, probably yes, and absolutely.)

-- 
         sentience@pobox.com      Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
          http://tezcat.com/~eliezer/singularity.html
           http://tezcat.com/~eliezer/algernon.html
Disclaimer:  Unless otherwise specified, I'm not telling you
everything I know.