X-Message-Number: 3178
From: Ralph Merkle <>

Subject: CRYONICS Marvin Minsky article in Scientific American:  Will Robots 
Inherit the Earth?
Date: 	Sun, 25 Sep 1994 19:29:06 PDT


The October 1994 Scientific American has an article by Marvin Minsky.
Minsky is on the Board of Advisors of the Foresight Institute.
The title and the first few paragraphs of the article are:

--------------------------------

Will Robots Inherit the Earth?

Yes, as we engineer replacement bodies and brains using nanotechnology.
We will then live longer, possess greater wisdom and enjoy capabilities
as yet unimagined.

   Early to bed and early to rise,
   Makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.
       --Benjamin Franklin

Everyone wants wisdom and wealth.  Nevertheless, our health often gives
out before we achieve them.  To lengthen our lives and improve our minds,
we will need to change our bodies and brains.  To that end, we first must
consider how traditional Darwinian evolution brought us to where we are.
Then we must imagine ways in which novel replacements for worn body parts
might solve our problems of failing health.  Next we must invent strategies
to augment our brains and gain greater wisdom.  Eventually, using
nanotechnology, we will entirely replace our brains.  Once delivered from
the limitations of biology, we will decide the length of our lives--
with the option of immortality--and choose among other, unimagined
capabilities as well.

In such a future, attaining wealth will be easy;  the trouble will be
in controlling it.  Obviously, such changes are difficult to envision,
and many thinkers still argue that these advances are impossible,
particularly in the domain of artificial intelligence.  But the sciences
needed to enact this transition are already in the making, and it is time
to consider what this new world will be like.


----------The last three paragraphs are:

Whatever the unknown future may bring, we are already changing the rules
that made us.  Most of us will fear change, but others will surely want
to escape from our present limitations.  When I decided to write this
article, I tried these ideas out on several groups.  I was amazed to find
that at least three quarters of the individuals with whom I spoke seemed
to feel our life spans were already too long.  "Why would anyone want to
live for 500 years?  Wouldn't it be boring?  What if you outlived all your
friends?  What would you do with all that time?" they asked.  It seemed as
though they secretly feared that they did not deserve to live so long.  I
find it rather worrisome that so many people are resigned to die.  Might
not such people, who feel that they do not have much to lose, be dangerous?

My scientist friends showed few such concerns.  "There are countless things
that I want to find out and so many problems I want to solve that I could
use many centuries," they said.  Certainly immortality would seem
unattractive if it meant endless infirmity, debility and dependency on
others, but we are assuming a state of perfect health.  Some people
expressed a sounder concern--that the old ones must die because young ones
are needed to weed out their worn-out ideas.  Yet if it is true, as I fear,
that we are approaching our intellectual limits, then that response is not
a good answer.  We would still be cut off from the larger ideas in those
oceans of wisdom beyond our grasp.

Will robots inherit the earth?  Yes, but they will be our children.  We owe
our minds to the deaths and lives of all the creatures that were ever engaged
in the struggle called evolution.  Our job is to see that all this work shall
not end up in meaningless waste.

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