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Future Shock Levels

sl4.org · 962 words · saved by 1 readers

The classification is useful because it helps measure what your audience is ready for; for example, going two Shock Levels higher will cause people to be shocked, but being seriously frightened takes three Shock Levels.  Obviously this is just a loose rule of thumb!  Also, I find that I often want to refer to groups by shock level; for example, "This argument works best between SL1 and SL2".  (This does not mean that people with different Shock Levels are necessarily divided into opposing social factions.  It's not an "Us and Them" thing.) The use of this measure is that it's hard to introduce anyone to an idea more than one Shock Level above - and Shock Levels measure what you accept calmly, not what you know about.  There are very few SL4s, and I was not one of them (too enthusiastic) when I wrote "Staring Into the Singularity" 1.0.  If somebody is still worried about virtual reality (low end of SL1), you can safely try explaining medical immortality (low-end SL2), but not nanotechno

©1999 by Eliezer S. Yudkowsky. Written 06/10/99. Revised 05/14/01. Summary: A Shock Level measures the high-tech concepts you can contemplate without being impressed, frightened, blindly enthusiastic - without exhibiting future shock. Shock Level Zero or SL0, for example, is modern technology and the modern-day world, SL1 is virtual reality or an ecommerce-based economy, SL2 is interstellar travel, medical immortality or genetic engineering, SL3 is nanotech or human-equivalent AI, and SL4 is the Singularity. The classification is useful because it helps measure what your audience is…

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