
Jinnetic Engineering by Richard Stallman - revorad
http://stallman.org/articles/jinnetic.html
======
xxzz
Fascinating story.

The story's narrator is supposed to be a woman, but the story has an
unmistakably male voice. I can't pinpoint it exactly, but everyone I know who
talks like that is male. Part of it may be that there is no discussion of her
emotions at all, she sounds like a perfectly rational robot.

Also, considering the impact of voluntary ovulation and superior intelligence
on reproductive fitness, I suspect evolution will quickly develop an immunity
to the virus, reverting the harmful changes in merely a few generations.

~~~
jerf
"I suspect evolution will quickly develop an immunity to the virus, reverting
the harmful changes in merely a few generations."

Not with millions-soon-billions of super-intelligent people running around
with the capacity to choose to fix that. Evolution will be dominated by human
intelligence and intention at that point. It'll still exist, but, well,
essentially the story is a Singularity story and we can't predict what will
happen past the end of it.

------
dagheti
The question that this story raises is "Can we solve these hard problems of
aging, thinking, and feeling if we had intelligence far greater than we do
today?"

Are we meant to read the narrator's idea that they can even solve the problems
of aging and diseases and voluntary ovulation through science and intelligence
as naive or inevitable?

Just because we can imagine a virus or a team of super smart people solving
these problems, doesn't mean in reality it actually is possible to do so given
limitations of physics and human nature.

I guess it doesn't really matter if RMS meant this story to be a satire of a
technocrat's fantasy or a example of how increased intelligence would solve
some of our biggest problems but I think how people read the story will depend
a lot on their ideas about what is ultimately achievable and what is not
through intelligence.

~~~
revorad
This discussion between Peter Thiel, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and Aubrey de Grey -
<http://www.vimeo.com/7396024> \- has some good thoughts from the top people
who are in fact working on those problems.

Couple of important highlights for me were:

Eliezer saying that he has to often remind himself to do not what he has most
fun doing, not even what he has talent for but what _needs to be done_.

The other is Aubrey talking about how appalling it is that the smartest people
in science work on the same things instead of working on important but ignored
problems.

I highly recommend watching it, it's well worth the 29 minutes.

------
mike_organon
This is a weak story. It even says the genie is supposed to screw with the
wishes, but then apparently doesn't. The only point of the story is to state
some sci-fi fantasies about improving human life, and these aren't very
illuminating.

Concerning the ethical statements (selfishness is foolish and will lead to
disaster) of the jinn, it might be interesting to see a jinn story about an
altruist that gets 3 wishes and how those lead to disaster. Of course, real-
life history is full of that.

------
colah
I'm not sure the three wishes chosen are the best possible.

Obviously, ``Five more wishes, please.'' Would be nice, but the Jinn obviously
would have refused.

Something that would have broken entropy would have been nice, though. A
battery that can give infinite current...

A spaceship would also have been a good choice.

~~~
bitwize
"Name anything, uchuusen that blings..."

------
rman666
Square Spots Illness? Indeed.

------
greyman
"I can't give you the interview you've been begging for, but at least I can
now explain how I was able to change fields and accomplish so much in such a
short time."

It's not very often I stop reading HN-submitted article after the first
sentence. ;) Do we really need more Stallman here?

~~~
praptak
Oh yeah? So I'm modding you down without reading your comment. Neener-neener.

~~~
dunstad
One: Since you're responding to his comment, it seems likely that you did, in
fact, read it. True, it could have been read to you, or you could perhaps have
used a Braille reader, or maybe you were bitten by a radioactive spider and
developed the ability to psychically know what people's HN comments say
without reading them, but statistically speaking it's probably safe to assume
none of those are true.

Two: Assuming you _did_ downmod his comment without reading it, you're
exhibiting arbitrary behavior in a community of mostly reasonable and logical
people. Perhaps this isn't the best place for you.

