Why the future doesn't need us: Part 1

This article was published in April 2000 in Wired. It's a bit dated but worth reading:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html

What fascinates me about this is the number of brilliant minds that are driving us toward this future. What horrifies me is that they seem to believe that the destruction of humanity via this technology is "inevitable", so that they bear no responsibility for what they are doing. The author of the Wired essay may be uncomfortable with this, but I'm not sure about the rest of these geniuses.

This reminds me of the "Manifest Destiny" fantasy: the belief that the indigenous peoples of North America died because their deaths were "inevitable" ... perhaps even ordained by G-d. We were somehow not at fault, and we couldn't have stopped it even if we wanted to.

What bullshit. The whole thing gives me the creeps.

And we're paying these guys billions of our hard earned dollars to create a future in which we will all be killed?

WTF ???

And if "immortality" is one of the goals of the melding of humans and robots foreseen by Kurzweil and others, this would certainly run afoul of what our Creator intended for us:

And the Lord G-d said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever:
Therefore the Lord G-d sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken.
So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.

Genesis 3:22-24 KJV

We were driven from the garden for the express purpose of preventing us from becoming immortal. What do you think G-d will do when we attempt to achieve immortality against His wishes? I'm sure the robot lovers don't really care about what the Bible says, but what do you think? Do they have the right to do something that may get us all tossed into the bottomless pit?

By the way, let me tell you a story about Ted Kaczynski, the alleged "Unabomber" mentioned in the Wired essay.

Let's start with his appearance. Ted was a true Luddite who lived a primitive lifestyle. In EVERY post-college picture of him you can find he is wearing a beard. Then how come the police sketches of the Unabomber show a thin mustache but NEVER a beard?

Ted was captured in 1996 and tried for a number of crimes. At some point after his capture (I cannot remember exactly when), a strange event occurred in the neighborhood in which I was living in Mahomet, Illinois.

One of the residents of the neighborhood, a man who worked at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, failed to report for work and dropped out of sight. When his out-of-state family initiated a welfare check, the local sheriff found him huddled in his home in Mahomet (which is near Urbana-Champaign). He was removed and taken to a hospital for evaluation and treatment. I'm not certain what happened to him after that.

The important thing I would like to stress, however, was that his home was filled with explosives and what appeared to be bomb-making materials, and he had additional such materials hidden in storage rooms in town. The local authorities confiscated these materials and destroyed them at a local military facility.

I'm not claiming that this person had anything to do with the "Unabomber" crimes, but nowhere did I read that he was ever investigated for any of them. As I recall, even though Ted Kaczynski had already taken the rap for being the Unabomber, there was not sufficient evidence to convict Ted of all the bombings. I think it would have been reasonable to investigate whether this OTHER person had any involvement in the crimes. However, I have never read whether or not this was done. And now that the evidence has been destroyed (all of his explosives), such an investigation is impossible.

This is more or less what happened with Timothy McVeigh. Once the government got a conviction and a death penalty for Tim, they stopped looking for John Doe No. 2, even though there was credible evidence that a John Doe No. 2 did exist and was in the Ryder truck that brought the bomb to the Murrah Building.

In my view, Ted Kaczynski was NOT the only Unabomber and may not even have committed ANY of the crimes of which he was convicted. I think he was a man who wanted his manifesto published to the world and who piggy-backed himself onto the Unabomber phenomenon to achieve his goal. To you and me, this may seem like a stupid thing to do, but perhaps from Ted's point of view it was worth the price.

And the idea expressed in the Wired essay that we should never listen to "terrorists" is stupid. Does it make sense to not listen to them but to turn our very future over to "geniuses" who knowingly are undertaking the creation of a future in which robots might kill us all?

What kind of "genius" is that?