In my last post, Mitchell Porter (whose mailing list postings I’ve been reading for nearly a decade), argues that my vision for a Neo-Carboniferous world is “deliberately low-key”, and he paraphrases it as, “Hey, greens! You shouldn’t fear us robot-swarm, mind-uploading, planet dismantling transhumanists! Look at this vision of a leafy green Carboniferous world that we’ve conjured up for you!” Then he remarks, “It says nothing about, say, how we meet the WMD-fabber-on-every-desktop problem without outright relinquishment, nor does it really tackle the problem of whether having as many trees and human beings as possible truly seems like a good thing, when you have truly godlike power and insight”.
Mitchell’s comment, and Sebastian Hagen’s before his, are on the mark. By transhumanist standards, the vision I present is boring and conservative. My point is to attempt to flesh out the wide range of possibilities inherent when intelligence commands self-replicating machinery. For myself, I’d appreciate a Neo-Carboniferous Earth just as easily as if it were a computer simulation on a matchbox-sized nanotechnological computer, as if it actually existed in the “real …