Re: Will Spiritual Robots Replace Humanity by 2100? -- Conference notes + thoughts

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From: Adam L. Beberg (beberg@mithral.com)
Date: Mon Apr 03 2000 - 23:31:42 PDT


> I made note that the audience ( who seemed to be comprised mostly of
> Theology Majors) had more of a clue about the topic at hand than
> most of the panelists.

What strikes me about your notes is that views on the subject
haven't changed since the sci-fi of the 50's. Computers will pass us,
they will be sentient, we need to play nice, yadda yadda yadda.

The only change from a similar conference held with a similar group of
experts at any time in the last 5 decades is that now we're pushing
nanotubes instead of the fringe tech of the day.

We know what will happen, we know roughly when it will happen [far far
before 2100], we know it WILL happen. What we don't know is what we do
with all those useless biological blobs that cannot keep up. How do we,
the humans, transition to a society where those not genetically
engineered and borg'ized cannot function at all? "First world" society
can't even cope with a tiny population of homeless and the aging baby
boomers, how the heck are we going to cope with the increasing numbers
of technologically irrelevant? Will society collapse at 10% obsolescence
or 50%?

So when are people gonna talk about the real issues? This isn't about
"them" it's about "us", "us" is the one that can't deal with change.

[I really should finish that essay huh]

- Adam L. Beberg
  The Cosm Project - http://cosm.mithral.com/
  beberg@mithral.com - http://www.iit.edu/~beberg/


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