27 and 28 are useful tools for fiction and interesting thought exercises, but it is not how we build houses (mine is right-side-up and has its plumbing in its bathrooms rather than on the roof, thank you). It may not be how we should build eutopias in which we hope to actually live. I like comfort. I expect culture to change radically—the way cultures do when time passes and/or things change—once everyone has settled into transhumanity, but the form that transhumanity takes needn’t itself be frightening, and trying to design this in sounds like a bad idea.
I think the point of including those 2 laws was that most people are made uncomfortable by almost all radical changes, in culture or in anything else...and the few radical changes that they think are obviously a good idea probably don’t align with other people’s sensibilities. But put them in that radically changed (but in some way truly better) culture, and they’ll adapt and stop finding it scary/weird/disturbing/etc.
(On another note: this must be a place where our personalities/outlooks differ, because I find the idea of an initially-scary Eutopia kind of...well, exciting and appealing. It sounds like a situation where I would learn something and where I would become stronger, and I have a lot of warm fuzzies towards those concepts.)
Oddly enough, there are some people who aren’t particularly interested in learning or becoming stronger. Would your preferred radical change sit well with them?
I wasn’t claiming that the future should be scary and different because of my personal preference...any more than Alicorn was claiming that her personal preference for no surprises should determine the future for everybody. I was really just pointing out that although I agree with Alicorn on a lot of things, this is a particular area where we are different, probably more because of personality than values.
I guess this was more my point: there’s a wide variance in terms of human preferences for novelty vs familiarity, and I’m far from the novelty extreme. Any future that doesn’t take that into account is going to make someone unhappy–well, either overwhelmed and terrified or really bored, depending on which side of the continuum that future ends up on. But given that even in today’s world, it’s possible for at least some people to choose the level of risk/novelty/scariness they want in life, hopefully it shouldn’t be too hard to tailor a eutopia in that sense, either.
I think the point of including those 2 laws was that most people are made uncomfortable by almost all radical changes, in culture or in anything else...and the few radical changes that they think are obviously a good idea probably don’t align with other people’s sensibilities. But put them in that radically changed (but in some way truly better) culture, and they’ll adapt and stop finding it scary/weird/disturbing/etc.
(On another note: this must be a place where our personalities/outlooks differ, because I find the idea of an initially-scary Eutopia kind of...well, exciting and appealing. It sounds like a situation where I would learn something and where I would become stronger, and I have a lot of warm fuzzies towards those concepts.)
Oddly enough, there are some people who aren’t particularly interested in learning or becoming stronger. Would your preferred radical change sit well with them?
I wasn’t claiming that the future should be scary and different because of my personal preference...any more than Alicorn was claiming that her personal preference for no surprises should determine the future for everybody. I was really just pointing out that although I agree with Alicorn on a lot of things, this is a particular area where we are different, probably more because of personality than values.
I guess this was more my point: there’s a wide variance in terms of human preferences for novelty vs familiarity, and I’m far from the novelty extreme. Any future that doesn’t take that into account is going to make someone unhappy–well, either overwhelmed and terrified or really bored, depending on which side of the continuum that future ends up on. But given that even in today’s world, it’s possible for at least some people to choose the level of risk/novelty/scariness they want in life, hopefully it shouldn’t be too hard to tailor a eutopia in that sense, either.