As you say, I used to choose my albums by their covers. You’d find specific covers or titles alluring-things would jump out at you, but it was largely a matter of happenstance. So just in a matter of time, such things will happen, and some of them will be extraordinary. So the question is whether or not this will represent a radical discontinuity in the styles of intervention. Harris: What’s your view of changing the species in ways more radical than the mere happenstance of evolution? I think what’s so intriguing about the history of civilization and technologies is that with every new technology that offers some increment of possibility, it comes with the greater possibility of its own negation. Krakauer: Well, I think it’s a really intriguing and important point. It’s interesting to consider. I don’t mean it’s wrong in the sense that we’d be causing ourselves or anyone to suffer.

What are our ethical obligations to people who don’t exist? I don’t know what it would look like, but the conjunction of your abacus talk and your saying it would be ethically problematic not to push forward into space in future generations made me think of this. That is a positive future for me, but I think that’s the path of great labor. It would be great to have a technology or a device, something as simple as an abacus, that allows us to internalize a commitment to future generations. But, yeah, exactly. So I’m not saying the past is great. Krakauer: Sam, just to interject, let me be very clear: I am not a Pollyanna about the past. Don't let this discourage you from having future tournaments. If we could somehow make a commitment to the future more reflexive and more vivid, more emotionally and ethically salient to us, and internalize that-I think that’s one thing we need. We’re really bad at solving problems that have a time horizon longer than our own near future or our children’s future at most-something like global climate change. Optimization problems in design engineering are complex by nature, often because of the involvement of critical objective functions accompanied by a number of rigid constraints associated with the products involved.

Both academic and industrial laboratories are working to develop computers that operate more like the human brain. For me it’s extraordinary that over the course of billions of years, we’ve gone from a planet that looked like the surface of Mars, perhaps-it was lifeless-and now it’s the Rolling Stones and Johann Sebastian Bach and Emily Dickinson. So now we have things like Netflix and Amazon where, based on your reading or watching history, based on what millions of people very much like you have rated as enjoyable, you’re getting various recommendations. We get channelized, and the walls of the channel are getting higher and higher. I see a major liability here in getting ghettoized intellectually and ethically. More detail on the WPA guidelines can be viewed here. Physical law, to the extent that we can measure it, is the same everywhere in the universe. And as to the chaplaincy, he did not pretend that he cared for it, except for the sake of the forty pounds. Krakauer: Well, first of all, I believe it’s already happened. Actually, yours is the first message to mention a problem. The problem with our case is that there is only one.

Moves are used scientifically to obtain the best results in the shortest period of time against one or more aggressors. Harris: I think those examples are importantly different. Harris: Spent a lot of time listening to Yes? Harris: I’m the canary in the coal mine, What is a billiard player sartorially speaking. So I’m with you. I’m simply saying that if you develop a technology that could give you incredible freedom, why not use it to do that? Why do we do what we do? Strictly regulated and designed by serious men - engineers - in white coats, the soccer ball has come a long way since the days when yokels, er, locals happily blew-up a pig’s bladder (after removal from the porker) and booted it around the muddy fields of Auld England, followed by a bewildered pig wondering why it was peeing out of its left ear.. The black ball is placed upon a spot about 9 in (23 cm) in front of hole number one.