From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Tue Mar 11 2003 - 10:25:19 MST
Ramez writes
> I'm not trying to be callous here. I care about people, even those I
> haven't met, and I do my small bit to help eliminate needless death.
> But individuals die. They always have and they always will.
Given the kinds of technology that might control our solar
system in only a century, this would turn out to be false.
Individuals might very well *never* die. The cryonics and
immortalist literature has dealt with this for decades.
For example, when humans are uploaded they'll have enough
secure backup copies that the probability of death drops
very close to zero. We should keep this goal before us.
> Alternately, when you [Eliezer] said "humanity" did
> you mean the human species? If so, should we care?
> I care about individuals.
Yes, so do I. And this definitely includes one Ramez
Naam, for example. Absolutely no one should look upon
our present situation as certain death sentence.
> If those individuals are AIs or post-humans or such,
> is that any worse than if those individuals are humans?
> I don't see why. But maybe I'm unusual in having more
> sentience-loyalty than species-loyalty.
Don't you see the frightful logic that you are allowing
yourself to carelessly embrace? It's as though Montezuma
and his Indios friends had said, "It will be good if we
continue to live, but does it really matter if the Spanish
live instead, and we die?"
Why isn't there room for everyone to live? As Feynman
said, "there's plenty of room at the bottom".
> Then [this advanced alien] gives you [the primate precursor
> to humans] the choice. Should humanity be allowed to come
> into being or not? I would choose yes.
Excellent choice. But it need not be at ours, or anyone's
expense.
> Today, I would rather see creatures with more
> intelligence, awareness, creativity, passion, and curiosity than
> humans come into being. I don't want to do so in a way that hurts
> people,
Then don't embrace sub-optimal solutions!
> but I know that evolution goes hand in hand with strife.
Not after we get control of it! At least, not necessarily.
Death can become as Popper said of ideas: "It is better
to let them die in our stead." So particular algorithms
can either not be run, or be put on an extinction schedule
(i.e., if X is the algorithm that you deem in your own
space to be less worthy of run time, then you begin issuing
X one second of run time only every 10^n seconds, for
increasing integer n).
> Given the choice between humanity continuing in its
> current form for millennia vs. humanity succumbing
> to a post-human type of life, I'd choose the latter.
Well, as Rafal would say, nix the choice! This isn't a
thought experiment, and there need not be a hard choice.
Lee
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