Big claims

From: Ben Goertzel (ben@webmind.com)
Date: Sat Aug 11 2001 - 09:53:37 MDT


Sorry to offend, my friend -- yes, obviously, my post was purely humorous in
nature. Although I do occasionally suspect that you consider yourself my
evolutionary superior, I don't think you'd be crude enough to post this
opinion to the whole extropy list ;)

There have been so many unintentionally absurd posts on this list lately,
that I figured an intentionally absurd post might be a nice change ;p

Definitely, don't lose your dry sense of humor! It'll be your only solace
next year as you watch your rogue "Friendly AI" systematically annihilate
the human race, saving you for last only so that it can have the perverse
satisfaction of watching you realize how vain you were to think you could
affect its final goal system by mucking around with the goal systems of its
distant predecessors.... [Now *there*'s dry humor for you...]

ben (sheepishly hanging his head)

*****
Date: Fri, 10 Aug 2001 12:33:37 -0400
From: "Eliezer S. Yudkowsky" <sentience@pobox.com>
Subject: Re: Big claims

Ben Goertzel wrote:
>
> Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote:
> > I am your evolutionary superior, foolish mortal.
>
> Oh, yeah?
>
> Prove it!

Who are you, Declan McCullagh? I think it was pretty darn clear that I
wasn't saying that, seeing as how I set the phrase aside in quote marks
and said "Don't say this." You probably know it too. The rest of the
list may not, though, given an out-of-context quote like this, unless
they've seen the original material.

Somehow I've gotten more sensitive to this recently. If someone is trying
to kill off Eliezer Yudkowsky's brand of dry humor, they may be
succeeding.

- -- -- -- -- --
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence



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