Re: The Great Filter
N.Bostrom@lse.ac.uk
Thu, 22 Aug 96 21:32:18 GMT
Robin Hanson wrote:
>With such a warning in hand, we might, for example, take
>extra care to protect our
>ecosystems, perhaps even at substantial expense to our
>economic growth rate.
That would seem to be the only sensible thing to do, but
would it really help? If there is a solution that we can
figure out, and convince people of, it would seem unlikely
that not any of the millions of similar civilasations would
also have thought of it and implemented it. Is there any
reason to suppose that we could outwit doom when everybody
else failed? Perhaps, if we became convinced that the great
filter is in our immediate future, we should rather take a
chance and try to do something utterly absurd, something
that nobody else would have thought of? Like chopping off
the right arm of every newborn infant... (How would we
persuade the masses of the logic of this argument?)
Nicholas Bostrom n.bostrom@lse.ac.uk