Re: The Poor Masses

Chris Hind (bholat@earthlink.net)
Wed, 04 Sep 1996 04:47:53 -0700

>My bit
>in response to the "productive people each supporting
>millions of destitute loafers in the future": Why would we
>want to do that? Point being, they'd just keep breeding
>without foresight until they surpassed all the carrying
>capacity of the planet, and even with hightech, until in one
>last malthusian collapse they tried to consume the
>remaining products of civilization, leaving a burned out
>world without resources and with a slaughtered intellectual
>elite. Let's face it, the only solution is to make conception
>a cognitive and pricey activity, thereby guaranteeing at
>least a semblance of planning, foresight and economic
>wear-with-all. Let contagious nanotech provide universal
>barriers to all accidental conception. The population
>would drop to very comfortable and elite levels within two
>generations.
This won't occur at all! Simply because millions are being infected in india
and asia currently with HIV and so far there's no cure in sight. (unless you
count nanotech or viruses engineered to go out and kill HIV which won't be
for awhile) So this in itself will suck away a large portion of the low
intellect populous (it sounds cruel but true do to poor families stifling
their children's brain growth from malnutrition). This should open up vast
quantities of FREE LAND! Where we extropians can go out and claim it and
create a new country! :) (sick sense of humor).

>As for uploading and becoming von neuman machines.
>Honestly, am I the only extropian who likes the flesh?
We don't hate the flesh, we enjoy it while looking towards better alternatives.

Maybe I'm just an immortalist who
>thinks the whole universe should be our domain.
It can be.

>I guess I
>wouldn't mind being able to have alternate _identities_ of
>man, machine, cyborg, virtual entity--but I certainly don't
>want to be constrained to one.
Why would you be constrained? You could simply upload your brain to a
computer inside a box in a human biological drone's brain where you could
control the body from the box in it's head with the box being an interface
between the body and the digital consciousness. Therefore you'd experience
all human toils if you wished, but you can also simply emulate them in
virtual space so why go to all the trouble?

>Nor give up the best of
>humanity.
You would do neither

A product of the mind is art. And beauty is
>art. For those who think I'm shallow. Take a look at
>Michelangelo's David. I guess I'm as attached to physical
>beauty as I am to intellectual brilliance and scientific truth.
So what? Everything in virtual space will appear to you as 'real'. Maybe you
can't grasp the concept of what it would be like to be uploaded? Everyting
in virtual space would appear real and tactile to you. You could use every
sense in the virtual space or even amplify them. You could design new
emotions even. You could appear in the virtual space any way you wished to
look. You could even keep your original body post uploading and dispose of
the biological brain and put a box in it's skull cavity so that you could
control your original body when you wished. It would be as though you were
in your original body and hadn't been uploaded yet but you could have access
to the sum of human knowledge via wireless lan connections from the box in
your body's head to the internet. I want a T1 wired to my brain! :) You
could even have multiple bodies with different features and characteristics
and looks and jump in and out of them.