Comments on: It's Personal

By: Phil Bowermaster

Phil Bowermaster — Tue, 22 Feb 2005 09:55:05 +0000

Chris –

I think that all such treatments may be banned. (Or at least there will those who argue that they should be.) If some are allowed, I think we may find oursleves living in a much more agressive society even than we currently do. People will have boosted their confidence and eliminated their inhibitions, with many positive results and a few kind of scary ones.

Karl –

Based on your caveat about placing precautionary inhibitions in place, and your critique elsewhere about Anissimov’s suggestion that we just let robots develop, are you in fact suggesting that there should be one standard for human intelligence and a different one for non-human intelligence? Just clarifying.

By: Karl Hallowell

Karl Hallowell — Sun, 20 Feb 2005 08:45:00 +0000

One possible rule is that if the program or organism can grow naturally into an intelligent being then it should be permitted to. A human zygote outside a womb (natural or otherwise) isn’t going to naturally become a child. Neither is a very powerful computer in itself. But why shouldn’t we place precautionary inhibitions in a computer system to prevent the occurance of intelligence?

By: ChrisMcDirty

ChrisMcDirty — Fri, 18 Feb 2005 12:01:27 +0000

In Richard Morgan’s Kovacs’s series (Altered Carbon & Broken Angels) he presents a person who can switch gears into a mental state unfettered by normal human prohibitions against violence, and the result is pretty scary. He mentions that people who have this ability are prohibitied from being politicians because of this ability. I think that there will try to be laws which try to regulate what kinds of alterations are allowed, which will be ignored by the kinds of folks who would be the targets of said laws…