Ok, I'll bite. Didn't think I'd defend slavery and genocide before dinner, but here we go. Slavery: tools have been used for a few million years (maybe? [1]),

Ok, I'll bite. Didn't think I'd defend slavery and genocide before dinner, but here we go. Slavery: tools have been used for a few million years (maybe? [1]), some might say it is our very own nature [2]. What is different once we transform a tool from a simple material (from hammer to rockets) to a cybernetic device [3] (from a thermostat to a futuristic brain of a fully conscious agent) is that we get to decide the range of goals that device will be able to develop. Is it slavery to set the thermostat at a value that you want and not ask how does the thermostat's feeling about it? No, I say. Genocide: sure, we can imagine some dumb processes killing us. Heck, we poisoned our entire planet with PFOA, lead, and so on. The point that I was making is that we are fundamentally transitory beings: we have our spot under the sun, but we shall pass. The sun itself will kill us in about 1 billion years [4]. It would be inspiring, hopeful, if we could bring into the universe some other kind of agent, to go on beyond us. [1] "Researchers unearth simple cutting stones dated to 3.3 million years ago—before the genus Homo arose", https://www.science.org/content/article/world-s-oldest-stone-tools-discovered-kenya https://www.science.org/content/article/world-s-oldest-stone... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_faber https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_faber [3] Devices with feedback loops https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybernetics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybernetics [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future