Abstract

Chalmers is right: we should expect our civilization to, within centuries, have vastly increasedmental capacities, surely in total and probably also for individual creatures and devices.We should also expect to see the conflicts he describes between creatures and devices with more versus less capacity. But Chalmers' main prediction follows simply by extrapolating historical trends, and the conflicts he identifies are common between differing generations. There is value in highlighting these issues, but once one knows of such simple extrapolations and standard conflicts, it is hard to see much value in Chalmers' added analysis