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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
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