I think Holden partly put the cart before the horse by talking about consequences of a duplicator without even trying to show that a duplicator is possible. Perhaps the previous article has his answer:
[suppose] You think our economic and scientific progress will stagnate. Today’s civilizations will crumble, and many more civilizations will fall and rise. Sure, we’ll eventually get the ability to expand throughout the galaxy. But it will take 100,000 years. That’s 10x the amount of time that has passed since human civilization began in the Levant.
The difference between your timeline and mine isn’t even a pixel, so it doesn’t show up on the chart. In the scheme of things, this “conservative” view and my view are the same.
Except that Holden is building “the most important century” series, and discussing a person-cloning technology that could be 400 years away, or 99,900, doesn’t make the case for 21st-century-as-most-important.
Also, the duplicator route is one that makes “the little people” like myself fairly irrelevant. My IQ is only like 125, and wouldn’t this duplicator be reserved for the top 0.1% or so? Maybe you need something like a 150 IQ to be worth duplicating, unless you are somebody like Beyoncé or Bill Gates with wealth and/or a proven track record. Or perhaps Xi’s hand-picked successor takes over the world and only duplicates his most loyal followers and scientists. Even if this century is the most important, that matters little to me if I cannot participate in the revolution.
In the current world, what I need to enable me to meaningfully influence the future is money I don’t have, but I am more likely to get that than new genius abilities. Now, I don’t oppose duplicators, but it seems like we’re very far from having one. Just bringing people out of poverty and wage-slavery (e.g. via UBI and/or an Open Engineering program) would quickly enable a lot more smart people to do smart things rather than just obeying the boss’s orders.
I think Holden partly put the cart before the horse by talking about consequences of a duplicator without even trying to show that a duplicator is possible. Perhaps the previous article has his answer:
Except that Holden is building “the most important century” series, and discussing a person-cloning technology that could be 400 years away, or 99,900, doesn’t make the case for 21st-century-as-most-important.
Also, the duplicator route is one that makes “the little people” like myself fairly irrelevant. My IQ is only like 125, and wouldn’t this duplicator be reserved for the top 0.1% or so? Maybe you need something like a 150 IQ to be worth duplicating, unless you are somebody like Beyoncé or Bill Gates with wealth and/or a proven track record. Or perhaps Xi’s hand-picked successor takes over the world and only duplicates his most loyal followers and scientists. Even if this century is the most important, that matters little to me if I cannot participate in the revolution.
In the current world, what I need to enable me to meaningfully influence the future is money I don’t have, but I am more likely to get that than new genius abilities. Now, I don’t oppose duplicators, but it seems like we’re very far from having one. Just bringing people out of poverty and wage-slavery (e.g. via UBI and/or an Open Engineering program) would quickly enable a lot more smart people to do smart things rather than just obeying the boss’s orders.