From - Mon Dec 3 07:37:54 2001 Message-ID: <3C0A4D85.8942286@clark.net> Date: Sun, 02 Dec 2001 10:49:25 -0500 From: Tiny Human Ferret Reply-To: klaatu@clark.net Organization: copyright 2001 all rights reserved -- non-UseNet transmission prohibited. X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.5 [en] (X11; U; Linux 2.2.17 i586) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: alt.non.racism,alt.talk.twentysomething,soc.culture.african.american,alt.politics.immigration,alt.activism.children Subject: Re: Combatting Racism References: <9tb9q0$f49$3@slb3.atl.mindspring.net> <3BFA21B7.8F09E7C1@charter.net> <3BFA7220.C5E11A26@charter.net> <3C01A28A.CBD5FC3F@charter.net> <3C03B97B.B1A2CAAC@clark.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit NNTP-Posting-Host: 65.205.1.226 X-Trace: vienna7.his.com 1007308249 65.205.1.226 (2 Dec 2001 10:50:49 -0500) Lines: 136 X-Authenticated-User: tjh22isp Path: vienna7.his.com Xref: vienna7.his.com alt.non.racism:26364 alt.talk.twentysomething:534 soc.culture.african.american:627170 alt.politics.immigration:189638 alt.activism.children:110865 toto wrote: Dorothy, if you're going to quote huge blocks of text, please at least have the courtesy to format them so that they're readable. > > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > > On Tue, 27 Nov 2001 11:04:11 -0500, Tiny Human Ferret > wrote: > > >toto wrote: > >> > >> On Sun, 25 Nov 2001 21:01:46 -0500, William Scott > >> wrote: > >> > >> >> Incan and Mayan empires (among other societies) were able to > >> >> grow and prosper. > >> > > >> >If they were so great, where are they today? > >> > >> Where will our Empire be after a few thousand years? > > > >We'll have encountered "The Singularity" long before then, probably > >within the next quarter-century to half-century. > And a new *machine* empire? Or will something totally new and > different evolve from that? If man is superceded, the direction may > not be building on human intelligence, but something totally > different. Humans have an emotional brain which actually > directs human intelligence. I see no way of building that into > *The Singularity.* And, of course, I am not sure that enhancing > *human* intelligence won't win over the creation of artificial > intelligence. The Singularity -- a term coined by Dr Vernor Vinge, an internet pioneer as well as award-winning science-fiction author -- is basically the time beyond which no even science-fiction visionaries can predict. When the world has changed beyond any meaningful comprehension of Moderns. You seem to be at least marginally familiar with some of the ideas of the Extropians, the Transhumanists, etc. You might also want to familiarize yourself with some comments by Bill Joy, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems, in his paper "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us", available at http://www.earthops.net/joy/ Look -- there are a great many things with which I concern myself, but primarily, I hope to have a long life worth living in a future in which it's worth living a long life. There are many trails leading to different futures and not all of those futures appear even-remotely pleasant when they fade into the fogs beyond reasonable prediction. These unpleasant futures generally proceed from certain trends. The one trend that is guaranteed to produce a terrible and generally hopeless future is the trend combining population increase with resource depletion. Other trends are equally unpleasant, ranging from a separation of the highly technical and wealthy populations from the poor and mostly-nontechnologized populations, globally distributed, rather than having generally-wealthy and developed entire nations or cultures geographically separated from impoverished cultures by borders rather than by estate walls. See http://www.earthops.net/klaatu/globalism.html for more remarks. Other trends leading to futures I don't want to experience are the increasing reliance on massive deployment of embedded processors, ubiquitous computing. Ubiquitous computing isn't necessarily bad, but reliance on it IMHO is a bad thing, since rather than redesign systems -- a bad system _should_ be redesigned -- fixes are made through better tuning. This is really much less expensive... but it leave you with a fundamentally bad system that is controlled through intense ubiquitous micromanagement. This inherently leads to a tendency to hypernetwork... and a hypernetwork is almost guaranteed to either produce a strongly-superhuman artificial intelligence which will occupy all available processing cycles and will want more, and will realize that it can at least double its processing space by usurping the meatware of the nervous systems of living intelligences. Some of the Extropians seem to think that this is a good thing, since they could similarly reproduce their personalities on computational systems and whatever happens to their bodies once that's done will be just fine with them. Some of the Transhumanists seem to think that they'd welcome being usurped by an AI run amok, since their knowledge and personalities are presumed to be absorbed within the AI, to mix and merge with the personalities and knowledge of all other people usurped to be dataprocessing nodes on a global datanet. Another nasty possible future doesn't require -- and in fact depends on a successful defense against -- AI emergence, but in this future the massive distribution of embedded processors become bent towards ubiquitous law-enforcement. The general consensus is that you'd be better off being usurped by an AI because at least it would just eat your brain, rather than making you a conscious and miserable drone living under a corruptible and human super-orwellian thought-police state. All of these rather nasty -- and forseeable -- futures depend entirely on having so many people that the first steps are taken down paths towards these ends. The slippery slope begins, in all cases, with a global excess of population. > >> Empires come > >> and go in cycles. > >> > >> Where is the Roman Empire? Or the British Empire? > > > >The Roman Empire lives on as the basis of most of the legal codes of > >the Western World; particularly in the anglophone world. > >Politically, as a Power, Rome doesn't have much influence today... > >but they left one heck of a legacy and they remain the standard by > >which all else is judged. Should we not strive to go them one > >better? > > > I see no particular reason to *compete* to go the Roman Empire one > better unless you really believe that the direction we are heading > is > *better.* It may not be.. No spit, sherlock. See above. > > We need a new paradigm.. Sustainability may provide the key > > http://www.ssu.missouri.edu/faculty/jikerd/papers/HARMONY.html Thanks for posting the primer on sustainability. However, in all cases, sustainability presupposes population reduction. We're burning our ecologic and energy-production capital at an astounding and increasing rate, due to the excess population. We need to reduce the population to about 2-billions globally, or less. > > Dorothy -- Be kind to your neighbors, even though they be transgenic chimerae. Whom thou'st vex'd waxeth wroth: Meow. <-----> http://earthops.net/klaatu/