From: Chris Cooper (coop666@earthlink.net)
Date: Thu Apr 05 2001 - 11:27:15 MDT
> >Ok James, so what exactly is your ideal future scenario? If you insist on
> >having some mystery left in the Universe I'm sure the Sysop will oblige
> >you by modifying your memories and dumping you permanently into a simulated
> >reality of medieval Europe. If you request such a thing of course.
>
> Who says that isn't what has already happened?
>If you prove it, I might be interested. Otherwise, the dominant
probability - in goal system terms, dominant source of differential
desirability - is the world taken at face value.<
If I told you I had proof, I'd probably be wearing a tin-foil hat, too. I was being a
little facetious with that first bit.
>This (and the rest of the post) show a misunderstanding of the nature of a
Sysop. Sysops are not there to protect you from yourself - not against
your own wishes, at any rate; that's not what a Sysop is for. <
According to you,that is. Again, this is why I hope that whoever is finally
responsible for the birth of AI gets it right. It's hard for me to have blind faith
that all this stuff will just work out. Obviously, our best chance is with the folks
on this list. But if someone else, with a very different philosophical outlook,
manages to make that breakthrough first, we could be living in a very different
place. I don't want to spend the rest of my post-Singularity life wearing a Dallas
Cowboys uniform, just because the guy who creates the first AI is a big football fan.
>You
can still instruct the Sysop matter to act like a rickety Model T and then
try to land on a neutron star and die, if that's your taste. <
I'd prefer a 1959 Cadillac, please. My previous comments weren't meant to imply that
I have a death wish.I was just trying to point out that the possibility of death is
part of dealing with the unknown. Take that out of the equation, and the challenge
might not be as, well, challenging. As Samantha suggested, a Sysop that keeps backup
copies on file, allowing us to do stupid and dangerous stuff without permanent loss,
while still gaining some wisdom from breaking our transhuman necks, might be an
acceptable alternative.
COOP
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