(Here is a short but enlightening conversation on Race and Racism from the
Extropy list I am subscribed to. Extropians are generally technophillic
individuals who see the application of technology to better the conditions
of life. They range all political spectrums, from ultra conservative to
ultra liberal, but they all share a common admiration and embracement of
being alive and living a fulfilling if not indefinate life. Racism is an
immaterial concept to extropians at an individual level because it resulted
from no choice of the individual and thus should never have any bearing on
the assessment of the individuals identity, but as reason dictates they
acknowledge that race does exist and it can be usefull to recognize group
based commonality of charactheristics, such as medically treating someone of
a particular race. - Mike)

Greg, a member of an Extropians governing body
recently posted a message simply entitled "Racism",
and spoke of its repugnance to Extropians. However, from
time to time it should also be explained exactly *why*
racism is wrong, especially on a list like this where
practically any idea is accepted for review.

It was briefly touched upon a recent email, but I want
to explain it myself. Racism is wrong because it
suppresses individual characteristics at the expense of
group characteristics. The truth is that the human race
is composed of human *individuals*, and that's not nearly
so true about the other higher animals. Every time racist
statements are pronounced, entire groups are denigrated
to the extent that no allowance is made for within-group
variation, and no allowance is made for the truth that
a person is an *individual*.

It follows, then, that views made about *individuals*
based upon the groups to which they belong are both
in error and are *wrong*. And, by that latter, I mean
exactly that I disapprove wholeheartedly.

Other people who are not ethical relativists can go
further than I, and claim that it can be scientifically
shown that such sentiments, as mine, are morally correct,
that there is an absolutely right moral stance, and that
racism fails to meet the criteria. While I *am* an ethical
relativist, and so cannot go that far, I am *not* a moral
relativist: I stridently disapprove of many things, and
do not hesitate to disparage them.

Sometimes, however, it's true that racist statements are more
than just very distasteful: it is egregiously *inaccurate*
to imply that all individuals of a human group exhibit some
genuine human trait, such as intelligence, to a lesser degree
than some other group. These errors must be firmly separated
from other kind of statement that one merely disapproves of.

But to return to the subject of odious (to me) racism,
a few months ago a guy at work made a number of remarks
that confirmed for me the impression I'd had that he's a
racist. He makes clear his disdain for many groups of
people (practically all but his own, I think), and is
not above seeing some other people at work as having
personal failings related to their color. But here is
where it gets interesting, and is, I think, typical of
racists: one of his *very* closest friends happens to
be from a non-white minority group, and I must say that
their friendship cannot be any less profound than is mine
with my closest friends---theirs is perhaps even more so.

This individual has even done exemplary service for a
Chinese woman we know, who was the victim of non-racial
persecution and harassment (sexual jealousy, I think).
Yet one day some months ago in conversation, while we
were discussing the possible use of nuclear weapons in
Afghanistan, he said "Well, I think that we should nuke
them *all*; why stop at Afghanistan?". I said, "What do
you mean? All the Arab nations?". He said, "I mean
all the third-world nations. What have they ever done
for civilization? Who needs them?" I said, "You mean
China, and South America, and so on?" He said, "Yes".

I took the time to confirm that he wanted to stand by
that statement, and for the sake of office harmony did
not say that I thought he was crazy. His problem---
and I do mean *problem*--- is that there is a very
serious disconnect between his personal reality and
his "global reality", if you will. I could have nastily
said, "Well Tim (not his real name), Cynthia used to
live in Canton, and was even *born* there! How CAN YOU
propose destroying millions of people who are just like
her?" (She was the one he had so nobly taken actions
away from work to defend, and whom he visits often.)

This attitude on the part of racists, I say, is quite
typical, and creates for them, I suspect a huge amount
of angst. They are, IMO, responding to deep-seated
instincts of xenophobia, which to me aren't necessarily
all bad (which is why evolution provided them to us),
but which seriously ruin any effort racists make to
integrate their disparate views and feelings into a
conscious, rational whole.

I know that for some people on this list, my abhorrence
at his beliefs was insufficiently displayed in my little
encounter with him, and that for the sake of political
correctness, I should have told him that his views were
"unacceptable", and then, at the present time denounce
this human being in the MOST uncompromising way. But
I just cannot totally condemn a significant section of
all people, and think of them as sub-human or anything.

I also hope that folks reading this list don't think
that this is some kind of propaganda ploy or mind game by
me, but realize instead that the words above are completely
sincere. Too often, of course, those on the right will
leave to the left all the denunciations of racism, (because
to us that's what they're going on about all the time anyway
even when the charge isn't warranted). By the same token,
liberals too often leave to the conservatives the needed
denunciations of wrong behavior that they also feel is
too often emphasized by *their* opposite numbers. All this
only increases polarization and suspicion, naturally.

It's these mechanisms I've discussed above that underlie
racism, IMO, and they're complex enough---and slippery
enough---that no final sweeping conclusions will be
rightly accepted as fact until people are vastly more
intelligent and knowledgeable than they are now. Puerile
denunciations of *hate*, for example---so common in the
media---do much more harm than good towards understanding.

In conclusion, perhaps it can be put this simply: racism
is wrong because it ignores individual differences.

Lee

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

You're on the right track, but I think the truth is both
simpler and more complex. Racism is wrong because--and
only when--it is irrational. Prejudice, like any
generalization, if often quite rational; but is a shortcut
for reason. When that's all the information you have, it's
fine to notice it and use it; the error is in persisting in
the use of prejudice even after better information is
available, or in using mistaken generalizations.

A doctor who failed to note the race of his patients, for
example, and use that information to help guide his diagnoses
and treatment plans is a bad doctor, and would be endangering
the lives of his patients. Group features exist: certain
groups have different likelihoods of different conditions,
and tend to respond differently to medications, etc. One
should use that information when it's available. One should
also /seek/ that information. A medical study that looks
for and reports correlations by race is a better study than
one that doesn't, because it enables doctors to use that
information when they have none better.

The error comes in either using generalizations that weren't
based on good information, or in clinging to generalizations
when you /do/ know more about the individual. It's fine to
use race to help diagnose and treat someone; but when you do
find that black kid with Tay-Sachs or the Swede with
sickle-cell, you must abandon the generalization in favor
of your more specific knowledge. But the next time a patient
comes in, you should test the black guy for sickle-cell.
To do anything else would be irrational and wrong (until, of
course, you get enough evidence to change your generalizations
as well).

Lee (a different Lee)

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

At 01:07 AM 9/25/2002 -0500, you wrote:
>A doctor who failed to note the (ancestry) of his patients, for
>example, and use that information to help guide his diagnoses
>and treatment plans is ...
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
---------------
1. The Debate Over Race Relations
How does a patient's race influence his response to drugs,
and should these differences be taken into account in
clinical trials? Geneticists have been wrestling with these
politically charged questions for more than a decade. In
the September issue's Paper View, Editor-in-Chief Kevin
Davies discusses a recent paper by Stanford University
geneticist Neil Risch and colleagues, who argue that
identification of genetic differences between racial and
ethnic groups is "scientifically appropriate" and that
"ignoring our differences . . . will ultimately lead to the
disservice of those who are in the minority."
http://www.bio-itworld.com/archive/090902/paperview.html

-ct


www.matus1976.com - Article archives

(The next part of Ray Kurzweil's essay - Mike)

from -
http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?main=/articles/art0134.html?m%3D1

Wherefrom Moore's Law

Before considering further the implications of the Singularity, let's
examine the wide range of technologies that are subject to the law of
accelerating returns. The exponential trend that has gained the greatest
public recognition has becomek nown as "Moore's Law." Gordon Moore, one of
the inventors of integrated circuits, and then Chairman of Intel, noted in
the mid 1970s that we could squeeze twice as many transistors on an
integrated circuit every 24 months. Given that the electrons have less
distance to travel, the circuits also run twice as fast, providing an
overall quadrupling of computational power.

After sixty years of devoted service, Moore's Law will die a dignified death
no later than the year 2019. By that time, transistor features will be just
a few atoms in width, and the strategy of ever finer photolithography will
have run its course. So, will that be the end of the exponential growth of
computing?

Don't bet on it.

If we plot the speed (in instructions per second) per $1000 (in constant
dollars) of 49 famous calculators and computers spanning the entire
twentieth century, we note some interesting observations.

Moore's Law Was Not the First, but the Fifth Paradigm To Provide Exponential
Growth of Computing

Each time one paradigm runs out of steam, another picks up the pace

[See attatched chart03.jpg]

It is important to note that Moore's Law of Integrated Circuits was not the
first, but the fifth paradigm to provide accelerating price-performance.
Computing devices have been consistently multiplying in power (per unit of
time) from the mechanical calculating devices used in the 1890 U.S. Census,
to Turing's relay-based "Robinson" machine that cracked the Nazi enigma
code, to the CBS vacuum tube computer that predicted the election of
Eisenhower, to the transistor-based machines used in the first space
launches, to the integrated-circuit-based personal computer which I used to
dictate (and automatically transcribe) this essay.

But I noticed something else surprising. When I plotted the 49 machines on
an exponential graph (where a straight line means exponential growth), I
didn't get a straight line. What I got was another exponential curve. In
other words, there's exponential growth in the rate of exponential growth.
Computer speed (per unit cost) doubled every three years between 1910 and
1950, doubled every two years between 1950 and 1966, and is now doubling
every year.

But where does Moore's Law come from? What is behind this remarkably
predictable phenomenon? I have seen relatively little written about the
ultimate source of this trend. Is it just "a set of industry expectations
and goals," as Randy Isaac, head of basic science at IBM contends? Or is
there something more profound going on?

In my view, it is one manifestation (among many) of the exponential growth
of the evolutionary process that is technology. The exponential growth of
computing is a marvelous quantitative example of the exponentially growing
returns from an evolutionary process. We can also express the exponential
growth of computing in terms of an accelerating pace: it took ninety years
to achieve the first MIPS (million instructions per second) per thousand
dollars, now we add one MIPS per thousand dollars every day.

Moore's Law narrowly refers to the number of transistors on an integrated
circuit of fixed size, and sometimes has been expressed even more narrowly
in terms of transistor feature size. But rather than feature size (which is
only one contributing factor), or even number of transistors, I think the
most appropriate measure to track is computational speed per unit cost. This
takes into account many levels of "cleverness" (i.e., innovation, which is
to say, technological evolution). In addition to all of the innovation in
integrated circuits, there are multiple layers of innovation in computer
design, e.g., pipelining, parallel processing, instruction look-ahead,
instruction and memory caching, and many others.

From the above chart, we see that the exponential growth of computing didn't
start with integrated circuits (around 1958), or even transistors (around
1947), but goes back to the electromechanical calculators used in the 1890
and 1900 U.S. Census. This chart spans at least five distinct paradigms of
computing, of which Moore's Law pertains to only the latest one.

[This is a significant point in this essay, very nearly every objection I
have ever heard to the continuation of Moore's law was that eventually we
will hit the limit to how small we can print semiconductor boards, this
fails to take into account that nearl half a dozen other technologies are
poised to take over conventional silicon based transistors when that limit
is reached, including quantum computing, moleculuar computing, mechanical
nanotechnological computing, optical computers, etc. etc. The same can be
said of virtually every technological progression, in transportation for
instance, we first started out walking, then tamed wild animals and soon
reached the end of the growth curve for horses, we then built ships that
used the wind to travel, and then vehicles powered by the burning of fossil
fuels, first to run simple steam engines and then to run 4 stroke otto cycle
internal combustion engines. Trains emerged allowing travel from coast to
coast of continents in a few days, where as in the days of the horse and
wagon people primarily grew up and lived in the same town there entire life.
When the trains started to hit the peak of its usefullness curve, the
automobile took over. The automobile is nearing the end of its usefullness
curve, and the large jet airliner is starting to maximize its potential,
allowing coast to coast travel in a matter of hours. Next in line will
surely be some type of personal flying transportation device, similiar to an
automobile, which will relieve the transportation woes of today. After
that, some type of interplanetary flight will be available just as
intercontinental flights are today, some years after that will likely be
inter stellar flights, on and on. But a similiar graph to Kurzweils
paradigm transcending transistor graph will show an exponential increase in
transportation as well, in terms of distance traveled per unit time in
constant dollars. I have been collecting data for just such a graph.]

It's obvious what the sixth paradigm will be after Moore's Law runs out of
steam during the second decade of this century. Chips today are flat
(although it does require up to 20 layers of material to produce one layer
of circuitry). Our brain, in contrast, is organized in three dimensions. We
live in a three dimensional world, why not use the third dimension? The
human brain actually uses a very inefficient electrochemical digital
controlled analog computational process. The bulk of the calculations are
done in the interneuronal connections at a speed of only about 200
calculations per second (in each connection), which is about ten million
times slower than contemporary electronic circuits. But the brain gains its
prodigious powers from its extremely parallel organization in three
dimensions. There are many technologies in the wings that build circuitry in
three dimensions. Nanotubes, for example, which are already working in
laboratories, build circuits from pentagonal arrays of carbon atoms. One
cubic inch of nanotube circuitry would be a million times more powerful than
the human brain. There are more than enough new computing technologies now
being researched, including three-dimensional silicon chips, optical
computing, crystalline computing, DNA computing, and quantum computing, to
keep the law of accelerating returns as applied to computation going for a
long time.

Thus the (double) exponential growth of computing is broader than Moore's
Law, which refers to only one of its paradigms. And this accelerating growth
of computing is, in turn, part of the yet broader phenomenon of the
accelerating pace of any evolutionary process. Observers are quick to
criticize extrapolations of an exponential trend on the basis that the trend
is bound to run out of "resources." The classical example is when a species
happens upon a new habitat (e.g., rabbits in Australia), the species'
numbers will grow exponentially for a time, but then hit a limit when
resources such as food and space run out.

But the resources underlying the exponential growth of an evolutionary
process are relatively unbounded:

(i) The (ever growing) order of the evolutionary process itself. Each stage
of evolution provides more powerful tools for the next. In biological
evolution, the advent of DNA allowed more powerful and faster evolutionary
"experiments." Later, setting the "designs" of animal body plans during the
Cambrian explosion allowed rapid evolutionary development of other body
organs such as the brain. Or to take a more recent example, the advent of
computer assisted design tools allows rapid development of the next
generation of computers.

(ii) The "chaos" of the environment in which the evolutionary process takes
place and which provides the options for further diversity. In biological
evolution, diversity enters the process in the form of mutations and ever
changing environmental conditions. In technological evolution, human
ingenuity combined with ever changing market conditions keep the process of
innovation going.

The maximum potential of matter and energy to contain intelligent processes
is a valid issue. But according to my models, we won't approach those limits
during this century (but this will become an issue within a couple of
centuries).

We also need to distinguish between the "S" curve (an "S" stretched to the
right, comprising very slow, virtually unnoticeable growth--followed by very
rapid growth--followed by a flattening out as the process approaches an
asymptote) that is characteristic of any specific technological paradigm and
the continuing exponential growth that is characteristic of the ongoing
evolutionary process of technology. Specific paradigms, such as Moore's Law,
do ultimately reach levels at which exponential growth is no longer
feasible. Thus Moore's Law is an S curve. But the growth of computation is
an ongoing exponential (at least until we "saturate" the Universe with the
intelligence of our human-machine civilization, but that will not be a limit
in this coming century). In accordance with the law of accelerating returns,
paradigm shift, also called innovation, turns the S curve of any specific
paradigm into a continuing exponential. A new paradigm (e.g.,
three-dimensional circuits) takes over when the old paradigm approaches its
natural limit. This has already happened at least four times in the history
of computation. This difference also distinguishes the tool making of
non-human species, in which the mastery of a tool-making (or using) skill by
each animal is characterized by an abruptly ending S shaped learning curve,
versus human-created technology, which has followed an exponential pattern
of growth and acceleration since its inception.

[End of part 3]

www.matus1976.com - Article archives

(In the first of a sure to be long series of the mitigation of academeic achievement, Students in Massachusetts can get a 'certificate of attainment' instead of a diploma, apparently to recognize their attempt, albiet failed one, to graduate high school. Wouldn’t it be a better idea to figure out why the MA public school system cant get kids to pass its graduate exams after three tries isntead of just giving them a meaningless certificate for 'trying'? - Mike)

MA school board okays diploma alternative

----------
Boston Globe
Students who repeatedly fail the English and math portions
of a Massachusetts test will get a "certificate of attainment"
instead of a diploma. The state board chair said in defending
the controversial plan, "It's to recognize and honor the effort
and persistence of students who have stuck it out ... who have
given it their best." (11/27/02)
http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/331/metro/Education_board_OK_s_alternative_to_diploma+.shtml

19- Pressure on earth's carrying capacity rises, says green group
----------
ENS
A new report measuring sustainability in terms of
"ecological footprints" has been released by Redefining
Progress. It states that human activity is exceeding the
planet's "biological capacity" by 20%. (11/28/02)

http://ens-news.com/ens/nov2002/2002-11-28-10.asp

13- Rated "R" for smoking
----------
Reason
by Charles Paul Freund
An amusing look at the Smoke Free Movies organization. (11/26/02)

http://reason.com/links/links112602.shtml

Editors' Links

Rated "R" for Smoking

By Charles Paul Freund

Bond lit a cigar. The ace secret agent was, after all, in Havana, and it was almost as natural to smoke a Cuban cigar in that city as it was in the capital, Miami. Pausing to exhale appreciatively, Bond prepared to resume his conversation with the gentleman next to him, a mobster whom he would surely have to kill eventually. There would be time enough for that later, however. For now, it was time to talk tobacco.

(Ray Kurzweil's 'Law of Accelerating Returns' Continued...- Mike)

The Singularity Is Near
To appreciate the nature and significance of the coming "singularity," it is
important to ponder the nature of exponential growth. Toward this end, I am
fond of telling the tale of the inventor of chess and his patron, the
emperor of China. In response to the emperor's offer of a reward for his new
beloved game, the inventor asked for a single grain of rice on the first
square, two on the second square, four on the third, and so on. The Emperor
quickly granted this seemingly benign and humble request. One version of the
story has the emperor going bankrupt as the 63 doublings ultimately totaled
18 million trillion grains of rice. At ten grains of rice per square inch,
this requires rice fields covering twice the surface area of the Earth,
oceans included. Another version of the story has the inventor losing his
head.

It should be pointed out that as the emperor and the inventor went through
the first half of the chess board, things were fairly uneventful. The
inventor was given spoonfuls of rice, then bowls of rice, then barrels. By
the end of the first half of the chess board, the inventor had accumulated
one large field's worth (4 billion grains), and the emperor did start to
take notice. It was as they progressed through the second half of the
chessboard that the situation quickly deteriorated. Incidentally, with
regard to thed oublings of computation, that's about where we stand
now--there have been slightly more than 32 doublings of performance since
the first programmable computers were invented during World War II.

This is the nature of exponential growth. Although technology grows in the
exponential domain, we humans live in a linear world. So technological
trends are not noticed as small levels of technological power are doubled.
Then seemingly out of nowhere, a technology explodes into view. For example,
when the Internet went from 20,000 to 80,000 nodes over a two year period
during the 1980s, this progress remained hidden from the general public. A
decade later, when it went from 20 million to 80 million nodes in the same
amount of time, the impact was rather conspicuous.

As exponential growth continues to accelerate into the first half of the
twenty-first century, it will appear to explode into infinity, at least from
the limited and linear perspective of contemporary humans. The progress will
ultimately become so fast that it will rupture our ability to follow it. It
will literally get out of our control. The illusion that we have our hand
"on the plug," will be dispelled.

[This is the cuase of the common source of fear and dread that many people
have when thinking of future technology. Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, in
his manifesto stated this as one of primary reason that an absolute
moratorium must be placed on technology. Kaczynski (and Bill joy) argued
that the more complex things get, the more humans will rely on other
computers to control them. With each increase in complexity humans are
moved further and further away from the controls. Eventually, the argument
goes they will be unable to control them. This is true, if one were to
insist that humans themselves never change. But as Kurzweil and many others
eventually point out, humans will likely increase their abilities as well,
and just as quickly as the AI counterparts, if not even faster.]

Can the pace of technological progress continue to speed up indefinitely? Is
there not a point where humans are unable to think fast enough to keep up
with it? With regard to unenhanced humans, clearly so. But what would a
thousand scientists, each a thousand times more intelligent than human
scientists today, and each operating a thousand times faster than
contemporary humans (because the information processing in their primarily
nonbiological brains is faster) accomplish? One year would be like a
millennium. What would they come up with?

Well, for one thing, they would come up with technology to become even more
intelligent (because their intelligence is no longer of fixed capacity).
They would change their own thought processes to think even faster. When the
scientists evolve to be a million times more intelligent and operate a
million times faster, then an hour would result in a century of progress (in
today's terms).

This, then, is the Singularity. The Singularity is technological change so
rapid and so profound that it represents a rupture in the fabric of human
history. Some would say that we cannot comprehend the Singularity, at least
with our current level of understanding, and that it is impossible,
therefore, to look past its "event horizon" and make sense of what lies
beyond.

My view is that despite our profound limitations of thought, constrained as
we are today to a mere hundred trillion interneuronal connections in our
biological brains, we nonetheless have sufficient powers of abstraction to
make meaningful statements about the nature of life after the Singularity.
Most importantly, it is my view that the intelligence that will emerge will
continue to represent the human civilization, which is already a
human-machine civilization. This will be the next step in evolution, the
next high level paradigm shift.

To put the concept of Singularity into perspective, let's explore the
history of the word itself. Singularity is a familiar word meaning a unique
event with profound implications. In mathematics, the term implies infinity,
the explosion of value that occurs when dividing a constant by a number that
gets closer and closer to zero. In physics, similarly, a singularity denotes
an event or location of infinite power. At the center of a black hole,
matter is so dense that its gravity is infinite. As nearby matter and energy
are drawn into the black hole, an eventh orizon separates the region from
the rest of the Universe. It constitutes a rupture in the fabric of space
and time. The Universe itself is said to have begun with just such a
Singularity.

In the 1950s, John Von Neumann was quoted as saying that "the ever
accelerating progress of technology...gives the appearance of approaching
some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human
affairs, as we know them, could not continue." In the 1960s, I. J. Good
wrote of an "intelligence explosion," resulting from intelligent machines
designing their next generation without human intervention. In 1986, Vernor
Vinge, a mathematician and computer scientist at San Diego State University,
wrote about a rapidly approaching technological "singularity" in his science
fiction novel, Marooned in Realtime. Then in 1993, Vinge presented a paper
to a NASA-organized symposium which described the Singularity as an
impending event resulting primarily from the advent of "entities with
greater than human intelligence," which Vinge saw as the harbinger of a
run-away phenomenon.

From my perspective, the Singularity has many faces. It represents the
nearly vertical phase of exponential growth where the rate of growth is so
extreme that technology appears to be growing at infinite speed. Of course,
from a mathematical perspective, there is no discontinuity, no rupture, and
the growth rates remain finite, albeit extraordinarily large. But from our
currently limited perspective, this imminent event appears to be an acute
and abrupt break in the continuity of progress. However, I emphasize the
word "currently," because one of the salient implications of the Singularity
will be a change in the nature of our ability to understand. In other words,
we will become vastly smarter as we merge with our technology.

[A question that may arise from this line of reasoning is how far technology
will progress exactly. Kurzweil in this essay focuses mainly on exponential
growth trends, and some technologies hint to exponential upon exponential
growth. But will this growth continue indefinately? It is likely that it
will not. Indeed our applications of technology will be limited by the laws
of physics, but this still opens a vast range of possibilities. Another
familiar mathematical growth curve is the "S" curve. An S curve, like an
exponential curve, will start with slow constant increases, looking like a
linear increase. Its rate of increase will start to increase, and soon it
bends upward, gently at first, and then sharply, until the line is nearly
vertical. Here is where an S curve deviates from a simple exponential
curve, and exponential curve may continue indefinately but the S curve turns
into a mirror image of the exponential curves first half. The previously
near vertical line starts to bend toward the right, gently at first, then
steeper until it forms a nearly horizontal line that continues to the right
of a graph. The overal shape of this curve resembles an S slightly shifted
to the right. If this graph represents a technological growth curve, the
smoothing out occurs when we start to hit the limits that the laws of
physics allow. We will get better and better at doing things in larger and
larger scales, but can never pass that limit. It is likely that technology
will follow such a curve, indeed almost every technology has so far. So
what may the universe be like at the end of this growth curve? We could all
be immortal, part machine hybrids, visiting planets across the universe]

When I wrote my first book, The Age of Intelligent Machines, in the 1980s, I
ended the book with the specter of the emergence of machine intelligence
greater than human intelligence, but found it difficult to look beyond this
event horizon. Now having thought about its implications for the past 20
years, I feel that we are indeed capable of understanding the many facets of
this threshold, one that will transform all spheres of human life.

Consider a few examples of the implications. The bulk of our experiences
will shift from real reality to virtual reality. Most of the intelligence of
our civilization will ultimately be nonbiological, which by the end of this
century will be trillions of trillions of times more powerful than human
intelligence. However, to address often expressed concerns, this does not
imply the end of biological intelligence, even if thrown from its perch of
evolutionary superiority. Moreover, it is important to note that the
nonbiological forms will be derivative of biological design. In other words,
our civilization will remain human, indeed in many ways more exemplary of
what we regard as human than it is today, although our understanding of the
term will move beyond its strictly biological origins.

Many observers have nonetheless expressed alarm at the emergence of forms of
nonbiological intelligence superior to human intelligence. The potential to
augment our own intelligence through intimate connection with other thinking
mediums does not necessarily alleviate the concern, as some people have
expressed the wish to remain "unenhanced" while at the same time keeping
their place at the top of the intellectual food chain. My view is that thel
ikely outcome is that on the one hand, from the perspective of biological
humanity, these superhuman intelligences will appear to be their
transcendent servants, satisfying their needs and desires. On the other
hand, fulfilling the wishes of a revered biological legacy will occupy only
a trivial portion of the intellectual power that the Singularity will bring.

Needless to say, the Singularity will transform all aspects of our lives,
social, sexual, and economic, which I explore herewith

www.matus1976.com - Article archives

(This article counters some of the common claims and arguments made against
the Pharmacuetical Industry. - Mike)

Bad medicine for America
----------
Heartland Institute
by Joseph L. Bast and Merrill Matthews
"Prescription drugs and their costs are high on political
agendas this campaign season. ... The not-so-secret
agenda ... is to create a new prescription drug
entitlement for seniors (and perhaps for everyone) that
won't bankrupt the country's taxpayers. By demonizing
the drug industry, they hope to build public and
political support for draconian price controls on
prescription drugs." (09/02)

http://www.heartland.org/perspectives/medicine.htm