Technological Immortality
Seven years ago I published a paper arguing against afterlife beliefs and various other kinds of βdeath denialβ titled βThe Incoherence of Denying My Deathβ. The denial of death in this sense is not a denial of physical or biological death so much as it is a denial of annihilation. In that paper I distinguished two ways of denying death, which are distinguished essentially by which word in the short proposition βI dieβ they deny. Strategy 1 denies the dying part β that is, it argues that I somehow (can) survive my physical/βbiological/βbodily death. Strategy 2 denies the βIβ in...
Crisis and Inertia (3) β Technological Threats and Crises
(This is part 3 in the βCrisis and Inertiaβ series.) Some advances of technology are feared by many. Some of those fears may be justified; others less so. Nuclear weapons are an obvious threat, but whether artificial intelligence (AI), for example, is likely to cause our demise is more controversial. This series isnβt about threats or fears, however, but about crises. The difference is that threats or fears may materialize, while crises are either already occurring or are unavoidable and thus will occur. Nuclear weapons are not a crisis, but their use would be, and as both the probability of...