Enhancing Humanity - Raymond Tallis
Anyone who considers the new technologies as inhuman, or as a threat to our humanity, should consider this. Better still, they should spend five uninterrupted minutes imagining the impact of a major stroke, of severe Parkinson’s disease, or Alzheimer’s disease on their ability to express their humanity. Those such as Fukuyama who dislike biotechnology do not seem to realise that the forms of ‘post-humanity’ served up by the natural processes going on in our bodies are a thousand times more radical, more terrifying, and more dehumanising than anything arising out of our attempts to enhance human beings and their lives.
Haukotus = aivojen tuuletin käynnistyy
We are meant to be here - Paul Daviesilta pari pätkää muistiin.
And the key point here is that the degree of error, which is inherent in the laws, depends on time. As the universe gets older, there are fewer errors because it's had longer to compute. If you go back to the first split second after the big bang, then the underlying errors in the laws of physics really would have been very large. So instead of thinking of the universe as beginning magically with a bang, and the laws of physics being imprinted magically on the universe with infinite precision right from the word go, we must instead think of the laws as being emergent with and inherent in the universe, starting out a little bit vague and fuzzy, and focusing down over time to the form that we see today.
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If future scientists are human beings, they may be stuck with the same problems that we have. The way we think, the way we like to analyze problems, the categories that we define -- like cause and effect, space-time and matter, meaning and purpose -- are really human categories that cannot be separated from our evolutionary heritage. We have to face up to the fact that there may be fundamental limitations just from the way our brains have been put together.
Changing One Species To Another - J. Craig Venter
We now know we can create a synthetic organism. It's not a question of 'if', or 'how', but 'when', and in this regard, think weeks and months, not years.
Our Biotech Future - Freeman Dyson
We are moving rapidly into the post-Darwinian era, when species other than our own will no longer exist, and the rules of Open Source sharing will be extended from the exchange of software to the exchange of genes. Then the evolution of life will once again be communal, as it was in the good old days before separate species and intellectual property were invented.
Sharing is Caring - Katsotaan mainosta vaihteeksi sillä silmällä, että jaossa ovat biologiset ominaisuudet. Jos minulla on pitkäikäisyys ja regeneraatio, kopioin ne sinulle.
A History Of Violence - Steve Pinker
A third theory, championed by Robert Wright, invokes the logic of non-zero-sum games: scenarios in which two agents can each come out ahead if they cooperate, such as trading goods, dividing up labor, or sharing the peace dividend that comes from laying down their arms. As people acquire know-how that they can share cheaply with others and develop technologies that allow them to spread their goods and ideas over larger territories at lower cost, their incentive to cooperate steadily increases, because other people become more valuable alive than dead.
Piratismi edistää maailmanrauhaa. Kannattaa pitää naapurisopua yllä, koska naapurilla on mielenkiintoista kulttuuria (ja geenejä) jaossa ja varmuuskopiot oman talon kamoista (ja geeneistä). Olisi hölmöä hyökätä varmuuskopioidensa kimppuun.
"We think what happened is that cats sort of domesticated themselves."
Derren Brown: Messiah - Taikuri kiertää tekemässä ihmeitä uskovaisille. Primitiiviset ihmiset luulevat messiaaksi jokaista, joka tietää enemmän tekniikasta.