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skeptical_lurker comments on Open Thread for February 11 - 17 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Well, there has not been a nuclear war yet (excluding WWII where deaths from nuclear weapons were tiny in proportion), climate change has only been a known risk for a few decades, and progress is being made with electric cars and solar power. Things could be worse. Instead of moaning, propose solutions : what would you do to stop global warming when so much depends on fossil fuels?
On a separate note, I agree with the kneejerk reactions, but its a temporary cultural thing, caused partially by people basing morality on fiction. Get one group of people to watch GATTACA and another to watch Ghost in the shell, and they would have very different attitudes towards transhumanism. More interestingly, cybergoths (people who like to dress as cyborgs as a fashion statement) seem to be pretty open to discussions of actual brain-computer interfaces and there is music with H+ lyrics being realeased on actual record lables and brought by people who like the music and are not transhumanists... yet.
In conclusion, once enhancement become possible I think there will be a sizeable minority of people who back it - in fact this has allready happend with modafinil and students.
Yes, and that seems truly damaging. I get the need to create conflict in fiction, but it seems to come always at the expense of technological progress, in a way I've never really understood. When I read Brave New World, I genuinely thought it truly was a "brave new world." So what if some guy was conceived naturally?? Why is that inherently superior? Sounds like status quo bias, if you ask me. Buncha Luddite propraganda.
I've actually been working on a pro-technology, anti-Luddite text-based game. Maybe working on it is in fact a good idea towards balancing out the propaganda and changing public opinion...
"Reactors by the thousand". Fissile and fertile materials are sufficiently abundant that we could run a economy much larger than the present one entirely on fission for millions of years, and doing so would have considerably lower average health impacts and costs than what we are actually doing. - The fact that we still burn coal is basically insanity, even disregarding climate change, because of the sheer toxicity of the wastestream from coal plants. Mercury has no halflife.