www.nickbostrom.com...
Nick Bostrom is well known for his work on the anthropic princple (
www.fact-index.com...).
From the paper:
We will examine a couple of scenarios in which freewheeling evolutionary developments take us in undesirable directions, and we will argue that if the
future evolutionary fitness landscape is such as to make these evolutionary courses the default (and we have no strong reason either for or against
this assumption), then the only way we could avoid long-term existential disaster is by taking control of our own evolution. Doing this, it will
further be argued, would require the development of a ?singleton,? a world order in which at the highest level of organization there is only one
independent decision-making power (which may be, but need not be, a world government).
[edit on 19-9-2004 by ktprktpr]