Robin writes:
> Nick B. writes:
> >The slave owners lacked certain essential technologies. For example,
> >they could not read the slaves' minds, and they could not simply
> >program the slaves to totally embrace whatever values the slave
> >owners wanted them to have. ... peoples' brains will no longer be
> >blackboxes where all sorts of unexpected things can happen; they
> >will be computational structures amendable to direct
> >manipulation by anybody in power at time zero.
>
> There is a vast difference between a single world government and a
> such a totalitarian power. Even when it in principle possible to read
> and modify brains, it will be at first very expensive.
Do you agree that this technology could be a strongly stabilizing
factor once it's cheap? And how could it be very expensive if it
requires nanotechnology? If you have one brain-scan machine, you can
use nanotech to cheeply give you (almost) any number you want.
> I find it pretty
> implausible that the first power to effectively use nanotech for military
> purposes will quickly also have the power to economically change human
> brains to be joyfully obedient without substantially sacrificing their
> productivity.
I don't find it implausible, but I suspect it will be irrelevant
since I believe that (biological) humans will at this stage, or
soon thereafter, not contribute significantly to the total
production.
_____________________________________________________
Nick Bostrom
Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method
London School of Economics
n.bostrom@lse.ac.uk
http://www.hedweb.com/nickb
Received on Fri May 1 23:22:50 1998
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