X-Message-Number: 977 Date: 11 Jul 92 03:14:24 EDT From: Thomas Donaldson <> Subject: Re: cryonics: #974 Hi Garrett: Certainly people will do or try to do damaging things with machines. But I don't think that they will be the cause of any obsoleting of human beings, mainly because there are far more people working on trying to prevent such damage than those trying to cause it. I see no theoretical difficulty, of course, in producing a fully conscious machine with a will and desires of its own. My problems come from the proposition that we will choose not only to do that but to arrange for such machines to be released on the world as our competitors. I don't see it happening by evolution or any other process to our TOOLS, which we have specifically designed (no matter how powerful and complex they may eventually become) NOT to have a will or desires of their own. But neither hammers nor computers can rebel against us. To make choices and understand how to use our tools we may well end up modifying ourselves; it is never possible to make choices without under- standing. But even that may not occur for some time: computers and other devices (telescopes, microscopes, etc) can help us learn things about the world that we could not have found otherwise, and work out the significance of those things (using massive computation or whatever), without any need to be physically attached to or a part of us. Hammers and computers are simple lumps of matter until we pick them up to use them for our purposes. Best and long life, Thomas Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=977