RE: Politicians attack idea futures

From: Emlyn O'regan (oregan.emlyn@healthsolve.com.au)
Date: Tue Jul 29 2003 - 18:01:11 MDT

  • Next message: Terry W. Colvin: "FWD [SK] Re: Portrait of a disturbed guy [Michael Moore]"

    > -----Original Message-----
    > From: Peter C. McCluskey [mailto:pcm@rahul.net]
    > Sent: Wednesday, 30 July 2003 2:10 AM
    > To: extropians@extropy.org
    > Subject: Politicians attack idea futures
    >
    >
    >
    > The DARPA experiment that Robin helped design has been cancelled:
    > http://www.nynewsday.com/news/ny-terrormarket0729,0,6260339.st
    > ory?coll=nyc-topnews-short-navigation
    >
    > CNBC is running a poll about whether it was a good idea.
    > Please vote at:
    > http://moneycentral.msn.com/content/CNBCTV/Promos/P56709.asp
    >
    > The reports indicate that it planned to provide anonymity (it's not
    > clear how reliable such anonymity would have been), which could have
    > enabled terrorists to profit from crimes under some
    > conditions (probably
    > only after years of testing under which the amounts traded gradually
    > increased to levels that matter).
    >
    > Don't despair too much - life insurance was initially attacked in
    > similar terms.

    I've run this idea by a sample of people working with me today, and they
    were repulsed by it. It's depressing, because it seemed like an obviously
    excellent idea to me when I first heard about it (yesterday). When you
    contrast it with the alternatives for dealing with terrorism, it's the idea
    of the decade to my mind.

    I don't know what you can do about this sort of thing, short of releasing
    intelligence enhancing nanobots into the drinking water.

    Emlyn



    This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Tue Jul 29 2003 - 18:10:50 MDT