X-Message-Number: 977
Date: 11 Jul 92 03:14:24 EDT
From: Thomas Donaldson <>
Subject: Re: cryonics: #974

Hi Garrett:

Certainly people will do or try to do damaging things with machines.
But I don't think that they will be the cause of any obsoleting of 
human beings, mainly because there are far more people working on trying 
to prevent such damage than those trying to cause it.

I see no theoretical difficulty, of course, in producing a fully 
conscious machine with a will and desires of its own. My problems come 
from the proposition that we will choose not only to do that but to 
arrange for such machines to be released on the world as our competitors.
I don't see it happening by evolution or any other process to our TOOLS,
which we have specifically designed (no matter how powerful and complex
they may eventually become) NOT to have a will or desires of their own.
But neither hammers nor computers can rebel against us.

To make choices and understand how to use our tools we may well end up
modifying ourselves; it is never possible to make choices without under-
standing. But even that may not occur for some time: computers and other
devices (telescopes, microscopes, etc) can help us learn things about the
world that we could not have found otherwise, and work out the significance
of those things (using massive computation or whatever), without any need
to be physically attached to or a part of us.

Hammers and computers are simple lumps of matter until we pick them up to
use them for our purposes.
				Best
				and long life,
					Thomas

Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=977