RE: longevity vs singularity

Billy Brown (ewbrownv@mindspring.com)
Thu, 22 Jul 1999 12:10:25 -0500

On Thursday, July 22, 1999 9:07 AM, den Otter [SMTP:neosapient@geocities.com] wrote:
> A much better, though still far from ideal, way would be
> to focus on human uploading, and when the technology
> is operational upload everyone involved in the project
> simultaneously. That way at least some people would
> have a fighting chance to become posthuman. In
> fact, I'm very surprised that so many otherwise fiercely
> individualistic/libertarian people are so eager to throw
> themselves at the mercy of some machine. It doesn't
> compute.

As I've pointed out before, uploading is much, much more difficult than most of its proponents seem to realize. You are better off concentrating on neural interfaces and cybernetic brain enhancments. If you go that route you can get your first intelligence enhancements long before uploading would be possible. You also get to make the upload a gradual transition, rather than an either/or proposition. By the time a complete human upload is possible you should already have a significant fraction of the population running mostly in software, with their physical brains being merely one of many specialized computational devices.

Billy Brown, MCSE+I
ewbrownv@mindspring.com