Re: Interspecific War WAS Re: Inadvertent media malevolence

Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
25 May 1999 13:36:07 +0200

"Raymond G. Van De Walker" <rgvandewalker@juno.com> writes:

> On 24 May 1999 17:12:41 +0200 Anders Sandberg <asa@nada.kth.se> writes:
> >Our most important objective media-wise
> >right now is to make transhumanism a respectable perspective, and not
> >just something that can be dismissed as fringe or unsupported.
>
> Just an ignorant question here. Do any of you have specific ideas
> for preventing an interspecific war of extermination between
> transhumans of different species, or between humans and transhumans?

Rationality. Why would species A want to get rid of species B (costly and dangerous), when they can instead trade or cooperate and both get the benefits? I have a half-written paper about this issue, and it seems that even wastly different transhuman species or humans-transhumans have little to gain by attacking each other due to things like the law of comparative advantage, the stability or reciprocal cooperation and the likeliehood of having very different ecological niches. As long as the number or impact of irrational agents is sufficiently low and there are no "dominant technologies" that give the wielder total dominance over any non-wielder, this seems to be stable.

> It seems to me that the simplest way is to prevent human speciation,
> but I'm willing to be surprised.

Lack of speciation has never hindred intraspecies wars. But it is notable that democracies never seem to go to war against each other.

-- 
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Anders Sandberg                                      Towards Ascension!
asa@nada.kth.se                            http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/
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