Re: Inadvertent media malevolence

Raymond G. Van De Walker (rgvandewalker@juno.com)
Fri, 28 May 1999 21:38:07 PDT

On 25 May 1999 13:36:07 +0200 Anders Sandberg <asa@nada.kth.se> writes:
>"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?
> 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.
Sounds good, but humans adapt every niche in the ecosystem to their own use. Humans _don't_ partition niches. Neither would transhumans, or other
_intelligent_ nonhumans. By simple Malthusian principles, wars of exterimination are inevitable between intelligent species. Ecologists have already establisehd that when two species 'share' a niche, in the long term they either partition it, or one goes extinct.

Ray Van De Walker rgvandewalker@juno.com



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