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palfrey at 03:59pm on 10/03/2003
palfrey at 03:59pm on 10/03/2003I finally got my copy of "Schild's Ladder" by Greg Bear today. It's very cool, very hard science sci-fi, my kinda thing.
It's also got a wonderful answer to one of the things asked of transhumanists every so often. Every so often, some deranged non-transhumanist tries to get a significant chunk of the transhumanist community (anything from a mailing list to the whole WTA) to promise not to start converting every bit of matter we can into "computronium" (rough element-like name for matter converted to be the most efficient computing substrate possible) the moment that this is possible. For various reasons, we're not going to promise this - everything from we probably wouldn't as it's morally objectionable, to we can promise anything *now* but this means nothing later....
The answer was "To which I can only reply: why haven't you indolent fleshers converted the entire galaxy into chocolate?". ROFLMAO. Unfortunately, I now need to try and explain this to ppl, as it won't make much sense to most ppl I know IRL......
It's also got a wonderful answer to one of the things asked of transhumanists every so often. Every so often, some deranged non-transhumanist tries to get a significant chunk of the transhumanist community (anything from a mailing list to the whole WTA) to promise not to start converting every bit of matter we can into "computronium" (rough element-like name for matter converted to be the most efficient computing substrate possible) the moment that this is possible. For various reasons, we're not going to promise this - everything from we probably wouldn't as it's morally objectionable, to we can promise anything *now* but this means nothing later....
The answer was "To which I can only reply: why haven't you indolent fleshers converted the entire galaxy into chocolate?". ROFLMAO. Unfortunately, I now need to try and explain this to ppl, as it won't make much sense to most ppl I know IRL......
amused
(no subject)
Are you sure?
If the mass of, say, the solar system produces enough computronium to store and run a perfect simulation of the solar system and still do a whole lot more processing on top...
...thorny question.
(no subject)
Someone once had the idea of "human rights" potentially becoming a fuzzy cause (i.e. like RSPCA) for posthumans.... hmmm... free-range humans... :-)
Now all we've got to do is persuade the stupid fuckers not to try and legislate against all of this....
Re:
(I should probably point out that I am not a transhumanist. Doesn't mean I don't think it contains some good goals)