[MURG] oh, the other thing

[Joseph J. Strout]

At 12:19 PM -0700 5/24/04, Aaron Miller wrote:

>You seem to be making the assumption that people will only upload their
>minds to counteract the effects of aging, which may not be true in the
>long-run.  I think that there would be a tendency among the uploaded
>population to favor artificial realities, since physical interaction with
>the real world would involve expensive and resource-consumptive robotic
>bodies.

You could just as easily say that at the start of the 21st century, 
technology exists to conduct all business by telephone, Internet, and 
other sorts of "telepresence," and cars are expensive and 
resource-consumptive, therefore we predict that most people do not 
own a car.

Yet in reality, most people do own cars, and do conduct most of their 
business in person.  Definitions of "expensive" and 
"resource-consumptive" depend on wealth and availability of 
resources.  It's reasonable to assume that in a future where 
uploading is commonplace, the population as a whole will also be 
quite wealthy and resources will be plentiful (as these are also 
effects of improved technology).

I have no doubt that many people will indeed flock to artificial 
realities, mostly because of the illusion of power they can provide. 
But I think that it will be a long time before most "normal" people 
are at all eager to upload, or to leave the real world once they have 
done so.  (We must keep in mind that most of us here are not socially 
normal.)

Mind uploading is a medical technology, like a heart transplant. 
You're thankful for it when the time comes that you need it, but you 
don't rush into it before you have to.  Even if you don't agree with 
this statement, I strongly recommend that you advocate this view in 
all public speech if you want uploading to be developed sooner rather 
than later.  Any talk of becoming super-humans thinking millions of 
times faster than normal people and otherwise planning to become 
godlike superwonders, will only get the whole enterprise branded as 
the egotistical fantasy of a bunch of socially isolated geeks.

So instead, let's focus on the medical problem: we want to save 
patients who are dying, and we want them to be able to live life as 
normally thereafter as possible, only free from the ravages of aging 
and disease.

Best,
- Joe

-- 
,------------------------------------------------------------------.
|    Joseph J. Strout         Check out the Mac Web Directory:     |
|    joe at strout.net           http://www.macwebdir.com/            |
`------------------------------------------------------------------'