X-Message-Number: 15869
From: 
Date: Thu, 15 Mar 2001 11:10:02 EST
Subject: possible futures

Concerning revival and rehabilitation of cryo patients, I wrote in part:

>>(I leave out of account the radical "singularity" scenarios.)

Damien Broderick replied, in part:

>Aaargh! You can't, you can't! Well, you can--but you need to give a damned
>impressive principled reason why the future *won't* go in the
>Singularity/Spike direction, and go there pretty fast at that. My hunch is
>that to get the technology required for revival from current rudimentary
>forms of cryostasis, we'll need moderately advanced nanotech and very, very
>good computation, probably at the AI or Super-AI level. Once those
>desiderata are instantiated, we'll be heading almost vertically up the
>Spike, and all bets are off, or moot. 

>I'd like to see a rebuttal of this general case, if there is one.

I was not trying to deny the possibility or even likelihood of a 
"singularity" or "spike." But Damien himself wrote that once we hit the 
spike, "all bets are off, or moot."

I do think the imminence of the spike is arguable. Many unexpected wonders 
have materialized, but also many expected wonders have failed to materialize. 
We'll just have to wait and see, although we could brainstorm and try 
clumsily to prepare for major changes.

Meanwhile, all we can really do in practice, as far as I can see, is blunder 
along the middle of the road, dodging traffic or hitching rides as best we 
can.

If the future--spike or not--brings "merely" quantitative changes, we can 
probably adapt. If some of the changes are qualitative in some profound 
sense, it is nearly hopeless to try to anticipate. In fact, it may be worse 
than hopeless--it may be counterproductive. Too many people are already 
frightened of even a moderately changed life, and would altogether refuse to 
face or contemplate major changes. 

From a cryonics standpoint, we must promote the view that the future will be 
better, but not incomprehensible or inhuman. That isn't dishonest, either--at 
least from a near to intermediate term standpoint. We have to take it step by 
step, and cross our bridges when we come to them.

Robert Ettinger
Cryonics Institute
Immortalist Society
http://www.cryonics.org 

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