Holland Takes Lead in Artilect Debate
As is clear from earlier news items, I am trying to get the world media to take the idea of a gigadeath artilect war seriously by generating a debate on whether humanity should build artilects or not.
On the 28th Nov 1999, in Holland, on prime time national TV (VPRO), a 3 hour special on the Immortality of the Body was shown. I received the following email in this regard. It shows that Holland has now taken the world lead in this debate. Warwick in the UK, Kurzweil and Moravec in the US are all saying that massively intelligent machines are coming in the 21st century, but noone as far as I know, except me, is saying that the artilect issue will generate a major war.
My greatest difficulty is getting people to take these ideas seriously. The idea that billions of humans may die in the 21st century over the potential creation of machines with intellectual capacities trillions of trillions of trillions of times above the human level is simply science fiction to most people, so I was very gratified to see Holland become the first country in the world to take these ideas seriously enough to give me 15 mins of prime time national television to express my views.
I have a video of this program (I spoke in English, and my words were subtitled, not dubbed by Dutch TV. I have both NTSC and PAL versions of the tape). If you are a serious TV journalist and you are thinking of making a TV documentary program on this issue, which I believe will dominate 21st century global politics, then I can send you a copy of this tape, free. Just tell me which version (NTSC or PAL) you want.
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Subject: Tv-program by the VPRO
Date: Fri, 10 Dec 1999 04:12:12 -0500 (EST)
From: Eduard Versluijs
To: Hugo de Garis
Dear profesor Degaris,
The program was about the eternal body (a special of 3 hours).
In it there were topics like; people who wanted (after their death) to be
frozen so in the future they could be revived,mind transferring into a
robotic body, a sculpture who used death body's and your intervieuw.
Your part lasted about a half hour.
I liked it, because you was the one who maked the most sense.
Eduard versluijs
P.S. Bye the way, great shorts for TV.
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Im looking forward to returning to Europe (Feb 2000, to Starlab in Brussels, Belgium). I speak more or less fluent English, French, German and Dutch, so I hope to work the West European media pretty intensively in a string of languages. If I marry my Japanese girlfriend, I promised her I would get fluent in Japanese, but I doubt being fluent in Japanese will get me on Japanese TV, because I am so critical of Japanese culture.