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Why The Future Doesn't Need Us
Atec Февраль 29 2008 20:16:19
Книга только для ознакомления
. Danny is also a highly regarded futurist who thinks
long-term - four years ago he started the Long Now Foundation, which is building
a clock designed to last 10,000 years, in an attempt to draw attention to the
pitifully short attention span of our society. (See "Test of Time,"Wired 8.03, page
78.)
So I flew to Los Angeles for the express purpose of having dinner with Danny and
his wife, Pati. I went through my now-familiar routine, trotting out the ideas and
passages that I found so disturbing. Danny's answer - directed specifically at
Kurzweil's scenario of humans merging with robots - came swiftly, and quite
surprised me. He said, simply, that the changes would come gradually, and that
we would get used to them.
But I guess I wasn't totally surprised. I had seen a quote from Danny in
Kurzweil's book in which he said, "I'm as fond of my body as anyone, but if I can
be 200 with a body of silicon, I'll take it." It seemed that he was at peace with
this process and its attendant risks, while I was not.
While talking and thinking about Kurzweil, Kaczynski, and Moravec, I suddenly
remembered a novel I had read almost 20 years ago -The White Plague, by Frank
Herbert - in which a molecular biologist is driven insane by the senseless murder
of his family. To seek revenge he constructs and disseminates a new and highly
contagious plague that kills widely but selectively. (We're lucky Kaczynski was a
mathematician, not a molecular biologist
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