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I would never discourage them, audacious goals are how real change is achieved. But in the history of the world, every time you conquer one disease, a worse an

I would never discourage them, audacious goals are how real change is achieved. But in the history of the world, every time you conquer one disease, a worse and scarier one seems to fill the void. And if you wanted to get pedantic, it could be said that Humanity is a disease of the Earth. Eliminating that infestation might qualify under the goal. Perhaps AI is not going to solve the problem by eliminating disease, but eliminating that which can be diseased. Kill the prey, and the predator dies.

projektir 10y ago
Pedantic or simply oddly foolish? That's not a precise statement at all. The concept of humanity-as-a-disease makes no sense outside of a highly misanthropic and Stockholm-syndrome-ish view of the world. "Earth" is not a sensing entity, for one, so you cannot commit moral crimes against it (i.e, bring forth to it the very real suffering that a human experiences from a disease), and it's also the source of both humanity and disease in the first place. We have diseases because "Earth" runs a process by which various creatures are continually created and torment each other to figure out who survives better. Removing humans would do nothing more but restart the misery process again, until another intelligent vehicle appears to try to resist it, assuming that intelligent vehicles are a low energy state that evolution-style processes like to reach. Such a vehicle is our best bet for the disease truly going away. The intelligent vehicle, of course, will be highly influenced by the natural world it came from. You could go for a Sargeras-style crusade and decide to extinguish all life in the universe and make all planets uninhabitable so that nothing can ever evolve again to cause diseases anywhere, but you would still need such an immensely powerful vehicle to enable that that you could as well stop wasting your time and make utopias instead because if you can handle FTL travel you can handle some microbes. > But in the history of the world, every time you conquer one disease, a worse and scarier one seems to fill the void. There are plenty of awful diseases people used to get from unsanitary conditions, malnourishment, and direct contact with nature that we don't talk about anymore because nobody gets them in first world countries or because they have been eliminated.

projektir 10y ago

Pedantic or simply oddly foolish? That's not a precise statement at all. The concept of humanity-as-a-disease makes no sense outside of a highly misanthropic and Stockholm-syndrome-ish view of the world. "Earth" is not a sensing entity, for one, so you cannot commit moral crimes against it (i.e, bring forth to it the very real suffering that a human experiences from a disease), and it's also the source of both humanity and disease in the first place. We have diseases because "Earth" runs a process by which various creatures are continually created and torment each other to figure out who survives better. Removing humans would do nothing more but restart the misery process again, until another intelligent vehicle appears to try to resist it, assuming that intelligent vehicles are a low energy state that evolution-style processes like to reach. Such a vehicle is our best bet for the disease truly going away. The intelligent vehicle, of course, will be highly influenced by the natural world it came from. You could go for a Sargeras-style crusade and decide to extinguish all life in the universe and make all planets uninhabitable so that nothing can ever evolve again to cause diseases anywhere, but you would still need such an immensely powerful vehicle to enable that that you could as well stop wasting your time and make utopias instead because if you can handle FTL travel you can handle some microbes. > But in the history of the world, every time you conquer one disease, a worse and scarier one seems to fill the void. There are plenty of awful diseases people used to get from unsanitary conditions, malnourishment, and direct contact with nature that we don't talk about anymore because nobody gets them in first world countries or because they have been eliminated.