david_musick@juno.com wrote:
>mark, now you're just being silly (although you do make a good point).
I'm not being silly; this utopian fantasy is itself just as silly as the Christian utopian fantasy, and I see no reason why enslaved SIs would willingly support humans who just sit on their ass all day watching TV. The more work you move from humans to machines, the smarter the machines become relative to the humans, until eventually the humans are simply obsolete.
>I wonder, though, how optimistic you are about the future.
Fairly, provided we can get out of the current phase of rampant busybodyism without catastrophic results.
>It seems like
>you attack anyone who proposes that things will turn out very well for
>everyone.
Things cannot turn out very well for everyone, because people have different desires which contradict each other; often when one person wins another loses. Personally I find most of the recent utopias suggested on the list hideous.
>Or perhaps you simply disagree with the means they propose for
>things turning out well for everyone.
I'm not interested in optimism, I'm interested in rational optimism; in fact I'd say that irrational optimism ('let's just ban [insert whatever the peril of the day is today] and everything will be wonderful') is one of the greatest problems we have today. Again, the recent utopias are irrational and try to skim over their fundamental problems in their rush to be optimistic.
Mark