Re: SOCIETY: The Quiet Revolution

Eliezer Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Thu, 26 Dec 1996 18:56:45 -0600

> Interesting thought: there will be a lot of millennarian groups predicting
> the End of the World around the millennium = hype. What will the reaction
> be when nothing happens? This might be the right moment to really move
> into the open and say "We have an INFINITE future!".

That is not what we should be worrying about. As a general rule, the
major religious reaction isn't when they turn out to be wrong. They
just ignore that. It's when they turn out to be right that you need to
worry about riots and the collapse of civilization. What if somebody
predicts the End of the World on March 3, 2001, and then a lot of
reputable Extropian scientists come out and say that "We could be seeing
major AI and nanotechnology before the end of the century..."

-- 
         sentience@pobox.com      Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
          http://tezcat.com/~eliezer/singularity.html
           http://tezcat.com/~eliezer/algernon.html
Disclaimer:  Unless otherwise specified, I'm not telling you
everything I think I know.