From: Mike Lorrey (mlorrey@datamann.com)
Date: Fri Mar 01 2002 - 21:06:36 MST
Richard Steven Hack wrote:
>
> At 02:36 PM 3/1/02 -0800, you wrote:
>
> >
> >Hmmmm... There are goals we "can" imagine, survival comes at the top
> >of my list. While the cosmic resources are large you don't have
> >access to a relatively "infinite" amount of them over short time
> >periods (perhaps of the order of millions of years). You hit the
> >limits of the solar system fairly rapidly after the singularity
> >takes off (probably in less than 1000 years).
>
> I would say sooner than that by far. IF you assume that consumption of
> resources by posthumans on a large scale is likely. My point is that this
> is NOT likely - certainly not for pure survival reasons. Unless you can
> make a case for that...
It is a rather standard human characteristic of a general incapacity to
properly appreciate exponential growth curves, whether it is saving
money for retirement, or calculating resource consumption rates for a
posthuman civilization.
That being said, one error that Robert Bradbury's most extreme "Pave the
Universe" scenarios make is to fail to account for the fact that each
greater generation under Moore's Law not only enables greater power,
processing, information, etc, but it allows the resource utilization
efficiency to rise as technology improves (this is, in fact, how new
generations of computers are able to squeeze greater performance out of
the same number of silicon electrons). It should not be surprising that
each new Moore generation would improve the utilization of mass and
energy resources by similar scales of exponential improvement.
Right now, energy and matter consumption efficiency doubling times in
human civilization still lag quite a bit behind computational efficiency
doubling times, but they are also improving. The advent of
nanotechnology will give this resource efficiency doubling time a kick
in the pants much as photonic circuits will give Moore's Law a kick in
the pants in a few years with computers.
>
> You also assume that some significant percentage of the human race goes
> posthuman. That might not be the case. If one assumes that only a small
> percentage of people desire the Transhuman state, and if one assumes that
> the majority of the human species do not, it may well come to it that only
> a small percentage (say, 1%) become posthuman. That gives us (at the
> present population) at most 60 million posthumans. I will grant that kind
> of number would eat up the solar system IF they need or want to. And I
> also suspect such a number will have no problem (in fact, I suspect ONE
> posthuman will have no problem) eliminating the rest of the human species
> if they become a problem to their (its) survival.
With practical immortality, it is irrelevant what percentage of each
generation chooses to live in a transhuman state. If ANY percentage
chooses to, eventually the vast majority of humanity WILL be tranhumans,
and the 'naturals' will be considered as much a feral minority as the
bushmen of the Kalahari are today.
The best revenge is to outlive your enemies.
> >
> >Agreed. But meta-"entities" at interstellar distances have a
> >difficult time "cooperating" on anything. The light speed limits
> >on probes and the spreading of communications beams makes the costs
> >of "cooperation" very high unless the communication requirements
> >for cooperation are *extremely* small relative to the amount
> >of computation that has to go into what is being communicated.
>
> You're assuming that they operate on that scale. They may not. Over time
> they may, but if you assume the speed of light as a limit (I don't, given
> the potential for extraordinary physics discoveries by posthuman
> intelligence), then it will be a very long time (relative to our standards,
> not posthuman standards for whom time I suspect will be mostly irrelevant)
> before posthumans spread very far anyway.
The problem is that you have no idea what the potential for
'extraordinary physics' is, on an objective basis. The record of human
scientific discovery doesn't bear this out. For instance, the speed of
light has been known since the days of ancient India (a means of
calculating light speed has been found in an ancient Sanskrit text), and
that knowledge has not changed in several thousand years. No new
scientific development has shown its actually possible to surpass the
speed of light in an practical way (i.e. even in the recent FTL
experiments, the wavefront NEVER exceeded light speed).
> >
> >I don't think you can escape from the "economics" as a means for
> >optimal resources allocation paradigm. If I give you free tickets
> >to a award winning broadway play and the Metropolitan Opera for the
> >same night you have to make a choice. There are opportunity costs
> >for using your resources (your time) for one thing and not another.
> >
> >Now presumably a completely self-regulating mind could "forget" about
> >the opera tickets and not realize that it had to pay the opportunity
> >cost of going to the play, but that doesn't mean that the cost wasn't
> >"really" paid. If the Universe is handing JBrains and MBrains stuff
> >to think about they actually have to make actual choices. Costs will
> >be incurred.
>
> Not necessarily - my choice may be to ignore both sets of tickets and trash
> them. You're speculating from a human viewpoint. Also, are we sure there
> are "opportunities costs" for posthumans? If you aren't going to die in a
> few decades, and you have everything you need to survive, why be in a hurry
> to do anything? You can do everything eventually (assuming you want to and
> assuming you can do enough of it to be satisfied before whatever
> "end-of-the-universe-thingy" occurs). You can make choices but they may
> not cost you much.
This is a rather cultish interpretation of things, in a further extreme
beyond the regular nano-santa giddishness that occurs here and elsewhere
among some transhumanists.
By ignoring the tickets, you certainly are forgoing an opportunity, even
if you trash them. So long as all information is not evenly distributed
in the universe, there WILL be opportunity costs for any intelligence at
ANY level of development. This is an information equivalent of the laws
of thermodynamics.
> >
> >I'm not so sure that you can make that conclusion. I could easily see
> >the "post"-humans becoming "Angels" for the humans.
> >
> >If there is a "moral" (ethical?) posthuman path, it would require
> >that natural humans be allowed to follow a "natural" course.
> >This of course gets into the very complex issue of whether
> >posthuman morality trumps human morality.
> >
> BTW, the reason I theorize that the UFOs are the results of a NON-human
> prehistoric civilization is precisely because I would assume one based on
> humans MIGHT act as "Angels" to the race following them.
Actually, given the Fermi Paradox, and if you accept that a)
intelligence is common in the universe, b) intelligent entities will
tend to spread out through interstellar space as they advance, and c)
nanotechnology and quantum computation and quantum encryption are
standard developmental technologies of technological intelligences, then
it logically follows that there could easily be intelligent posthuman
races existing here on Earth, who originated from one or many other
worlds in our galaxy, and who exist in a nanotechnological environment
as 'crypto-dirt', who communicate via quantum encrypted packet
signalling which we are unable to discriminate from background
radiation. Such posthuman civilizations could exist here and could be
hacking into the nervous systems of individuals to produce hypnogogic
experiences with 'angels' and 'aliens' and 'demons', and, of course,
making people hallucinate UFO's where none actually exist.
This conjecture is at least as likely as your nano-santa dreams (and
require the exact same set of circumstances to be true).
> I see no evidence
> of this. Of course, it may simply be that once posthuman, you simply do
> not care what happens to other sentient entities. Even Star Trek has the
> Prime Directive...
Star Trek is BUNK.
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