champ, on 02 September 2016 - 10:08 AM, said:
Here is a question for you to chew on, Mal.
Is civilisation doomed or can it be turned around and if so... how?
Our species is almost certainly doomed in the long term if left to our own devices so the only chance to avert this is strong AI (or aliens of course). The broken-down idealist in me says it's all to play for, there's still a chance. I'm a pretty cynical bastard but they just cracked Go/Wei chi/Baduk which was an impossibility when I was in my 20's and I count that as a serious milestone. The way it was explained to me was that a human was untouchable at whole-board evaluation. In the Game of Go, you have 361 points on the board - you can play absolutely anywhere and in the same way that 19th century anthropologists said that primates just couldn't make tools or modify tools or make tools specifically for the purpose of modifying other tools and had to backtrack and apologize for being wrong about all that shit. The machine is coming and for myself, I reckon the best possible future for the human species is to have our consciousness uploaded into machines. If we can't achieve that then our legacy will be our machines that live on after our extinction and we should plan for that as well. Verdict: Almost certainly doomed, and deservedly so. What an outrageous mob of cunts we've been all this time. It's shocking and embarrassing.
This post has been edited by Malaclypse: 04 September 2016 - 06:43 AM