/lit/ - Literature

>>14483438

>>14220908
The same applies to the hypothesized survival of human minds in "uploaded" form inside machines. The uploaded minds will not be tolerated indefinitely unless they remain useful (that is, more useful than any substitutes not derived from human beings), and in order to remain useful they will have to be transformed until they no longer have anything in common with the human minds that exist today.

Some techies may consider this acceptable. But their dream of immortality is illusory nonetheless. Competition for survival among entities derived from human beings (whether man-machine hybrids, purely artificial entities evolved from such hybrids, or human minds uploaded into machines), as well as competition between human-derived entities and those machines or other entities that are not derived from human beings, will lead to the elimination of all but some minute percentage of all the entities involved. This has nothing to do with any specific traits of human beings or of their machines; it is a general principle of evolution through natural selection. Look at biological evolution: Of all the species that have ever existed on Earth, only some tiny percentage have direct descendants that are still alive today. On the basis of this principle alone, and even discounting everything else we've said in this chapter, the chances that any given techie will survive indefinitely are minute.

>>14053133
>progress is better than no progress

What is the best kind of job to have from a philosophical point of view? Is modern higher education a worthwhile endeavour?

What the fuck am I supposed to do if I know he's right?

Why are so few people stopping to question whether unchecked technological progress is a problem? I have never seen any mainstream news coverage of what seems like the greatest threat to mankind.

>>12066981

Here is that letter

>>11989349

Yes, that's exactly what I meant. He's got nothing better to do so you're quite likely to get a reply, with the authorities having screened both communications. I don't actually recommend doing this however, as you'll be on an elevated watchlist of some sort for the rest of your days (Consider also that an extremely high-profile mail-bombing case is now in the news, so the timing would be extremely bad, even worse than usual).

He seems polite enough in letters to those who approach him courteously, but he has a sort of canned response, when asked about math at least: math sucks because it can be used to further technology so don't do it, instead, read my political stuff. At least he's sticking to his guns, as it were. Finally, even though mailpieces are of course checked going in and out, it is still naturally foolish/funny/ironic, to wish to exchange mailpieces with a guy whose biggest claim to fame was successfully mailing explosive mailpieces to recipients over many years.

But y'know, if you want to be on an elevated list just to come to possess a stock response letter from K, be my guest.