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This story states that Bill gates is on the run once again from the Belgian Custard Pie Hurler 'Noel Godin', the famous practical joker who has gotten the MS boss before.

More on the first Attack can be found here.

Ol' Billy now seems to be overly cautious now each time he is forced to visit Belgium.

How can intelligence get find itself high? A person with high intelligence can certainly appreciate chemically altered states, especially hallucinogenic ones, more so than your average simpleton. Nootropics will even increase the cognition of an already intelligent individual.

Smart people use sensible amounts of chemicals to enhance their lives. Idiots use drugs, but without direction or purpose. Luddites and moralists refrain from drug use. Luddites and moralists should be curbstomped. The future doesn't need them.

We are all made of chemicals. Some of us are just sharp enough to realize that we can take advantage of that fact by introducing the right chemicals into our systems to produce any given state desired.

Remember this. No amount of intelligence, will, or prayer will let us live forever. Chemicals are the gateway, intelligence is only the key to forging them into nanites.

You should read the Hedoninstic Imperative manifesto. The ultimate goal is to eliminate human suffering. Its an achievable goal too - as long as you are not so shortsighted as to linearly extrapolate the present into the future.

There was also a Futurama episode (the "Nappster" one with Lucy Lu) where a 50s-style educational film warned Fry that sex with robots would lead to the collapse of civilization, because all that man has accomplished is merely a side effect of trying to impress chicks in order to spread their seed. :)

Anyway, the fear of change is perfectly normal -- evolution favored those who didn't risk much change, leaving the occasional mutant do so. If it ain't broke, don't fix it, right?

What you deride as a "mental masturbation world", others, including myself, view as a hedonistic imperative to eliminate suffering in all sentient life.

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Then why'd you post Anon before?

I think human society has to mature a bit to handle "free stuff for all"

I agree, but it won't take centuries. Our tech is evolving faster than our still primative brains can cope with... but we can probably fix that with tech too.

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And why would replicators be scarce? Conspiracy? Even in the face of some unlikely(?) totalitarian world government, enforcing such an artificial scarcity for any length of time would be almost impossible.

The demand for such a device would be too much to suppress. All it would take is ONE freedom-loving scientist in a lab to reinvent the "top secret nano-bootstrap process" and the genie is out of the bottle for good (although at this point EVERYTHING should be saturated with a "active-nano-shield" security layer, so the "terrorists" wouldn't have any luck recreating the grey-goo scenario).

...is greed a primary human motive?

Thinking in evolutionary terms, yes, it's advantageous to survival. The world doesn't owe you anything... you have to take what you want.

if it is, can it be controlled?

These guys think so...

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It'll take a lot of hard work to "weed out" the negative aspects of human nature that no longer serve our accelerating evolutionary progess.

Speaking to the former point, however, you remind me a bit of David Pearce's thinking (which he calls the Hedonistic Imperative); if we can recreate consciousness, surely we can leave out the ability to suffer. I said to him, as I say to you, it may not be possible. And I mean, fundamentally, impossible. You are treading over interesting ground with respect to fundamental aspects of consciousness and subjective experience that we do not understand yet. If it were possible to systematically prevent suffering, however, I would tend to agree with him that by allowing suffering when we could choose not to, we would be cruel. Regardless, I am certain that we, as a people, would do it anyway.

I define the notion of "soul" as the idea that there is some agency beyond the brain which is responsible for our consciousness, our decisions, or our identity. I would hold that this has nothing to do with "good" and "evil," a dichotomy which is arbitrary and based, as much as we have a species-wide consensus on the subject, on our instincts, our genetic heritage.

http://hedweb.com/hedab.htm

While I don't know if I agree with the site or not, it is definitely an entertaining read about the hypothetical possibilities of the current research - they are basically saying how we're all going to be happy in the future due in part to nanotechnology, and how Huxley was very very wrong. Check it out - here and here. Enjoy.

If MWI turns out to be wrong, do we have to give some scientific account of "observation?" Is this possible?