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JOHO the blog linked me to
Ernie the Attorney on the singularity:
- Kurzweil better be wrong about when singularity will begin, because the principle [sic] feature of this watershed moment is that it will be the moment where the current state of human ignorance will become forever fixed....
Unless technology is somehow going to make us better thinkers then we are going to carry into this brave (and sudden) new world our very strong tendency to be led by fear and dogmatic beliefs (a/k/a "bias and prejudice").
ScienceFiction writer VernorVinge includes the possibility of a singularity producing "malign Powers" in his book A Fire Upon the Deep. It's not pretty. Some people (Kurzweil apparently among them) claim that of course when we go through the singularity we will rise above our petty confusions and attachments, so we needn't worry about such things. As long as we frame the issue as whether we'll be "better thinkers" that's a likely prediction for people to make, but it isn't it more a moral/spiritual question?
Anyway, by definition none of us know what the other side of TheNextSingularity looks like. I don't want to risk producing a malign Power, which is exactly why, as nifty as i think technology is, my energy is much more focused on healing/freeing us from fears and dogmas. (dogmae?)