Chris comments on The Litany Against Gurus - Less Wrong

23 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 18 December 2007 08:11PM

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Comment author: Chris 18 December 2007 10:00:32PM -2 points [-]

What about the Guru who wrote 'Why work towards the Singularity' ? It is a text with a distinctly Messianic feel. Or, to be more generous, a Promethean feel. While it is true that Hom Sap has a nasty itch to create anything that can be created, regardless, thre's no need for such pseudo valuations as the following : "If there's a Singularity effort that has a strong vision of this future and supports projects that explicitly focus on transhuman technologies such as brain-computer interfaces and self-improving Artificial Intelligence, then humanity may succeed in making the transition to this future a few years earlier, saving millions of people who would have otherwise died. Around the world, the planetary death rate is around fifty-five million people per year (UN statistics) - 150,000 lives per day, 6,000 lives per hour. These deaths are not just premature but perhaps actually unnecessary. At the very least, the amount of lost lifespan is far more than modern statistics would suggest." Who says that continuing the lives of us dull old farts, to the inevitable detriment of the unborn, has any positive value ? I'd say that's monstruous. The transhuman AI may be an unavoidable consequence of our Luciferian inclination to meddle. That doesn't mean it's a cause. Any chance of it becoming a cult ?