“Consider the horror of America in 1800, faced with America in 2000. The abolitionists might be glad that slavery had been abolished. Others might be horrified, seeing federal law forcing upon all states a few whites’ personal opinions on the philosophical question of whether blacks were people, rather than the whites in each state voting for themselves. Even most abolitionists would recoil from in disgust from interracial marriages—questioning, perhaps, if the abolition of slavery were a good idea, if this were where it led. Imagine someone from 1800 viewing The Matrix, or watching scantily clad dancers on MTV. I’ve seen movies made in the 1950s, and I’ve been struck at how the characters are different—stranger than most of the extraterrestrials, and AIs, I’ve seen in the movies of our own age. Aliens from the past.
Something about humanity’s post-Singularity future will horrify us...
Let it stand that the thought has occurred to me, and that I don’t plan on blindly trusting anything…
This problem deserves a page in itself, which I may or may not have time to write.”
“Consider the horror of America in 1800, faced with America in 2000. The abolitionists might be glad that slavery had been abolished. Others might be horrified, seeing federal law forcing upon all states a few whites’ personal opinions on the philosophical question of whether blacks were people, rather than the whites in each state voting for themselves. Even most abolitionists would recoil from in disgust from interracial marriages—questioning, perhaps, if the abolition of slavery were a good idea, if this were where it led. Imagine someone from 1800 viewing The Matrix, or watching scantily clad dancers on MTV. I’ve seen movies made in the 1950s, and I’ve been struck at how the characters are different—stranger than most of the extraterrestrials, and AIs, I’ve seen in the movies of our own age. Aliens from the past.
Something about humanity’s post-Singularity future will horrify us...
Let it stand that the thought has occurred to me, and that I don’t plan on blindly trusting anything…
This problem deserves a page in itself, which I may or may not have time to write.”
- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky, Coherent Extrapolated Volition