From: Robin Hanson (rhanson@gmu.edu)
Date: Fri Jun 20 2003 - 13:35:19 MDT
At 10:27 PM 6/19/2003 -0700, Ramez Naam wrote:
>* - The notion of groups who are able to achieve high degrees of
>internal transparency but are unable to achieve transparency with
>members of other groups is actually rather disturbing. It suggests
>the possibility of more deeply embedded tribalism among diverse future
>entities, with all the ills that tribalism brings.
Even when creatures share many design elements, I expect much
larger differences in raw abilities than among humans today. I
expect minds to vary by many orders of magnitudes of speed, memory,
etc, and bodies to very greatly by the environment they are most
suited for. And minds will vary more in how much they know about
and have specialized software for particular topics.
Thus we cannot remotely hope for peace via similarity. If your
favored route to keeping the peace today is via people noticing
how similar people are, and using political systems that ignore
differences, you'd better accept that this approach cannot last.
Of course we might hope for peace via rationality and self-interest.
Robin Hanson rhanson@gmu.edu http://hanson.gmu.edu
Assistant Professor of Economics, George Mason University
MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030-4444
703-993-2326 FAX: 703-993-2323
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