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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32879 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022

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I feel like, when you're talking about quadrillions of beings, our existing reasoning breaks down. That is assuming race is still going to be relevant post-singularity, which is at least highly questionable. I think skin color is going to go the way of rare dyes, where rarity used to signal social standing, but now that anyone can trivially have any dye in near any number, it's relegated entirely to aesthetic preference. - What else is there? IQ? Personal choice. Conscientiousness? Personal choice. Neuroticism? Habits? All, all, editable.

In the future, there will be a million times more white-people descendants, a million times more black-people descendants. There will be cross-blending, customization, randomization, de novo species. There will be telepaths, hiveminds, superintelligences, copyclans, and weirder things that we cannot even imagine now. I don't have an answer for you - but I'll eat my hat if the predominant moral question as we approach the physical Malthusian limit will be one of race.

Maybe! I hope so, as the best thing we can say about human progress is that we get to fail at a higher level of problem.

Then again, ingroup bias is strong, especially under threat.

Right, I think more like...

We have this picture. And it has a bunch of colored blobs on it. There's pink blobs, and brown blobs, and yellow blobs, and red blobs. What I'm saying is that we're about to open this picture in MSPaint and go absolutely hog wild on it for a billion years. It's not that ingroup bias isn't strong, it's that I doubt that there will be recognizeable racial ingroups even a century after the Singularity.

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