Ed, I thought (being a member of the board of the Extropy Institute), I would offer a comment or two on your brief, but balanced, article. > "The Rev. Kevin Phillips, rector of St. Timothy’s Episcopalian Church > in Mountain View, worries super-longevity and computer-human interfaces > could lead to vast imbalances of power in society." But this is already true. If you put Bill Gates beside someone from Harlem, their power may be irrelevant to their survival. Their ability to survive and prosper is highly environment specific. The key distinction recognized by most extropians is that the developmental path we are on significantly depreciates the importance of "power". When everyone can survive with little competition with another, then the dog-eat-dog perspective of our current reality becomes pretty irrelevant. Whether that gets replaced by a different competitive scenario and/or whether that is offset by a desire for companionship or increased diversity remain unresolved within the extropian community. Rev. Phillips perspective seems to deny that imbalances currently exist and fails to understand that future technologies are likely to serve as the great leveler of inequalities. > "There's some significance to human suffering that adds value to the human > project," he says. "[Without pain] life is diminished." The entire point of pain is to inform you about situations that may be a threat to your survival (or in extended situations a threat to the survival of your genes). Any rational system for evolution must provide feedback on successful vs. unsuccessful evolutionary strategies. If "pain" informs you that you are doing something that is not working, then it is useful. However, for conscious beings, it is presumably sufficient to for the feedback loop to indicate -- "the results of this experiment were unsuccessful". You do not have to torture people to improve the situation. You simply have to indicate that the current approach isn't working very well. Robert Bradbury [?1;2c