Re: Uplifting 666

Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@www.aeiveos.com)
Tue, 30 Nov 1999 23:09:45 -0800 (PST)

There are some days when this list simply goes off the deep end.

Daniel, writes about wanting to upload octopodes, which are either the latin plural of octopus or an acapella singing group (according to some subset of the 149 Altavista refs).

Then Eugene, chimes in with:

> Oh, yes. Especially squids: http://www.tccorp.com/outsider/to_collect.html
>

which is a collection of wierd Halloween leftovers as far as I can determine.

[Eugene, are you sure you haven't been testing some of your antifreeze compounds a bit prematurely???]

What makes it more interesting, is that the store selling the leftovers happens to be in Seattle, which as far as I can tell from observing the television tonight has gone a little off the deep end (7PM to dawn curfews, police & demonstrators throwing tear gas and pepper bombs at each other, National Guard called out, etc.) I expect more of the same tomorrow.

One has to wonder if the planners of the WTO meeting didn't say to themselves -- OK, we know this meeting is going to draw a lot of protesters, is there someplace we hold it that the weather will diminish the requirement for police? Ah yes, Seattle, in November, thats it...

Given the heavy labor protests involved against the WTO, one thing that becomes clear is -- we better get nanotech before we get AI, because if we get AI first, there are going to be a lot of out-of-work people who are going to be very unhappy. At least with nanotech first, we can tell tell them they have to retrain as design & QA engineers.

I might go a step further and say we should probably use biotech to get IA (intelligence augmentation) first, so "they" can see the development path as clearly as we do and (one would hope) develop more rational thought processes about how to take advantage of the opportunites one may expect instead of doing their best luddite impressions.

So, does IA before NT before AI work or does the discussion get get sucked into another black hole?

Unless Daniel/Eugene were suggesting that uploading octapodes would be better because 8 fingered creatures are a natural for digital (binary) logic, so they will adapt to the upload more easily and clearly run away with the SI.

Robert