From newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!news-server.ecf!utgpu!cs.utexas.edu!swrinde!mips!think.com!Think.COM!moravec Tue May 12 15:49:55 EDT 1992
Article 5506 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: moravec@Think.COM (Hans Moravec)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: AI successes
Message-ID: <ufa1aINNco5@early-bird.think.com>
Date: 9 May 92 01:31:22 GMT
References: <zlsiida.205@fs1.mcc.ac.uk>
Organization: Thinking Machines Corporation, Cambridge MA, USA
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In article <zlsiida.205@fs1.mcc.ac.uk>, zlsiida@fs1.mcc.ac.uk (dave budd) writes:
|> Anybody else feel that we're actually the midwives for a species that will 
|> ultimately take over the planet?
|> Could be that only machines will be able to survive the mess we're making of 
|> the biosphere....
|> 
|> 
|> 
|> +--Great Quotes of our Time---------------------------------------------+
|> |        Prediction is very difficult, especially of the future.        |
|> +--------------------------------------------------------Niels Bohr-----+

Not midwives: Parents (if not us, who would it be?).  And not
the planet, except maybe as an afterthought.  All of space
awaits for a new kind of entity designed to live there.
Not a new species, something much bigger.  We are the product
of a Darwinian meander, a patchwork of improvisations, barely
able to think at all.  If we play our cards right, we can invest
that last bit of luck, and  parlay it into successors built with
and evolving through foresight, a process that beats blind Darwinism.

Chemistry in solutions on earth made a big change when it stumbled on
Darwinian evolution and became Life (making a mess of the
pristine simple chemistry from which it started, incidentally).

Life on earth is making an equally big change because it has
stumbled on intelligence, and will turn itself into self-amplifying
Mind (utterly transforming earth, the solar system, and beyond, in
the process).


