to have him killed. They'd surely consider this their moral duty.
And they probably wouldn't be first in line, either. A lot of
people have seen the science fiction film, TERMINATOR TWO. They
might figure our friend Hans here as the future Architect of
Skynet. He wants to make the human race obsolete and let robots
rule. Doesn't that mean it'd be a lot more convenient to kill him
right now?
Of course we're not going to kill Hans now. I mean, not till he
gets hi s own satellite channel and starts his own religious
movement and asks for love-offerings. Not till he starts building
a posthuman brain in a box. When his technology moves from the
rhetorical to the commercial. When MIND CHILDREN become MIND
CHILDREN (TM) and they're manufactured by Apple and Toshiba and
retailed to adventurous aging yuppies. Fifty years to the
Singularity? Fifty years to the complete transformation of the
human condition? Maybe. Maybe it's just five years till the day
the Secret Service raids the basements of MIT and removes all
Hans's equipment. As for criminal charges, well, they'll think of
something. Maybe they can nail him on an FDA rap.
I do kind of believe in the singularity though. I think some kind
of genuine deep transformation in the human condition is in the
works. I have no idea what that will be, but I can smell it in the
wind. It's no accident that this historic period is producing
people like Mr. Moravec here. Right or wrong, he is a cultural
avatar. Maybe we're about to radically change the operating system
of the human condition. If so, then this would be a really good
time to make backups of our civilization.
That's why I want to bring up one last topic today. One last
weird, science-fictional idea. I call it Deep Archiving. It's
possibly the most uncommercial act possible for the institutions we
call libraries. I'd like to see stuff archived for the long term.
The VERY long term. For the successors of our civilization.
Possibly for the successors of the human race.
We're already leaving some impressive gifts for the remote future
of this planet. Nuclear wastes, for instance. We're going to be
neatly archiving
this repulsive trash in concrete and salt mines and fused glass
canisters, for tens of thousands of years. Imagine the pleasure of
discovering one of these nice radioactive time-bombs six thousand
years from now. Imagine the joy of selfless, dedicated
archaeologists burrowing into one of these twentieth- century
pharaoh's tombs and dropping dead, slowly and painfully. Gosh,
thanks, ancestors. Thanks, twentieth century! Thanks for thinking
of us!
