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Comment by davidhyde | Hacker News Reader

Maybe it is our destiny to create an entity that is better than we are. If humans die off or are pushed aside as a result, will that be so bad? Artificial superintelligence is only a dystopia from our current perspective.

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This sounds like an extreme form of moral relativism. If we die out, there can't be an "our" perspective anymore that could make this fact a utopia, or even okayish.

Humans wants religion, humans need religion, a lot of humans can't survive without religion. All those reports about religion decline in the world look misleading. It is just Christian God fell out of favor and a lot of people choose to worship Holy Technological Progress. You can easily recognize worshipers of his two main sects in threads like this.

First one claims that you don't need to worry about Climate Change, Super AI, Antibiotic Resistance Pathogens etc because Holy Progress would protect humanity from any threat. It is benevolent God who didn't let us down this far.

Second one claims that sacrificing yourself, your loved ones and the rest of humanity on the altar of Holy Progress is actually worthy goal. Because that is what they believe their God wants.

I agree. Comparing ourselves to humans of either 100k years in the past or the future will probably show that we have very little in common. An AI might be a big sudden leap (in any direction), but it's still something that came to be because of us.

Humans with European ancestry have been evolving along a distinct and separate lineage from Australian aboriginals for 80k years. In scientific terms Europeans and native Australians don't actually qualify as two separate races.

I'm of the same opinion. If we actually create something that much better than ourselves, it'll just be another step in our evolution, albeit an unconventional one in that it will involve passing on memes instead of genes.

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