From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Wed Apr 24 2002 - 07:24:43 MDT
Eugene writes
> On Wed, 24 Apr 2002, Lee Corbin wrote:
>
>> everything in its path to itself, it also finds that
>> it's squeamish [about dismantling people for compute
>> resources too]
> Why should the postbiology be so squeamish? Especially,
> in the face of economic pressure? (It's not just the
> people, it's the complete ecosphere they depend on --
> a rather rambling and vulnerable structure).
There are just two reasons that it might be nice to
humans, so far as I know: one, I. J. Good's meta-
golden rule---be nice to sentients far below you
who're at your mercy so that your rapidly evolving
descendent (who soon won't identify with you) will
be nice to you---, and two, because someone built
it to be that nice.
You're right about economic pressure, though. As the
speed of light becomes so slow (from the SI perspective)
evolution even over the Earth could break apart and become
localized quickly, and in that case systems that allowed
anything to hold back their own development would be at
a serious disadvantage.
> > about converting people too, so it lets us keep the
> > top .1 percent of the planet. And then it uses your
> > idea to perplex us:
>
> (I realize this thread is tongue in cheek, but some
> people might not aware of this).
Yeah, but only insofar as it being kind of funny (for
me any way) to imagine an AI that took over but didn't
want to mess with any of the Earth's surface because of
humanitarian or environmental concerns ;-)
> Where will they get their power, if not radiated from
> space, and requiring receptacles on the planet surface?
I don't know: but couldn't an SI grow quickly using oil
deposits kinda the way we do?
> Why should they stick to grossly underutilized 0.01% of
> the planetary mass, instead of disassembling and using
> 99.99% of it? (Of course it will eat the small rocks and
> planetesimals first, but why should it then balk at
> disassembling this place?)
;-) I was thinking that they'd leave us the top 0.1% as
part of the gag. That would be several miles deep. But
seriously, of course making a Dyson sphere (or sheaves, or
whatever Robert calls them) would be a priority for our
hungry entity.
Lee
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