From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Tue May 14 2002 - 21:10:56 MDT
Eugen wrote
>> Thus it's *very* important that AIs be developed who have a built-in
>> incentive to be reasonably nice to humans.
>
> "Reasonably nice" is not sufficient. Your specs (list of constraints) have
> to be watertight, because most of growth trajectories going through
> uncharted waters of many orders over orders of magnitude of complexity
> are not friendly.
Watertight for sure; what I meant by "reasonably nice" are things
that most people wouldn't consider nice at all, e.g., forcible
uploading and transmission exile from Earth.
> You have to slay Darwin, too, and to keep him out, which
> is even harder (Darwin is a zombie that way).
This cannot be repeated often enough.
> Singleton scenarios are unphysical. Those of them who're not catatonic
> failures (the default for man-made seed designs) explode in Blight. Tiny
> subset might hit metastability, but it's long-term stagnation, and
> engineering hubris in face of risks.
I think that sometimes you pack so many ideas into single sentences that
one can only guess what you're getting at.
> Don't make it hard, make it soft. Making the edge harder multiplies the
> risks. Here's the only mechanism which really teotwawki this place for good.
??? To me, a Singularity will occur when, and only when
an AI progresses far beyond human intelligence, and does
so very quickly. Is that hard or soft?
> Once beyond a certain threshold, all bi-directional flow of information
> ceases, both because of the different timebase and loss of incentive on
> the advanced player's part. So the gap will only grow, all the way until
> the ceiling (given by limits of computational physics), which might be
> quite soon by wall clock time.
Exactly so.
> You assume passive transport. Even so, airborne dust travels a lot. Active
> transport could involve global dusting from hypersonic vehicles or fractal
> cluster bombing via ballistic delivery. Initial growth might be slow, but
> exponential processes with active transport tend to be lightning quick
> after some setup time.
If it fears H-bomb attack, as Robert recommends, it could disperse bootstrap
elements of itself by parcel post, and then wait for what would seem to
be eternity to it (a day) before making a grab for all crustal resources.
>> light goes about a foot in a nanosecond, and a few kilometers will
>> seem far away indeed to the AI.)
>
> Not if the next being is cm away. Why do people always assume there's just
> one individuum? It's a population, and radiating furiously while you watch it.
If a collection of machines in a network of the type we see today
makes the breakthrough, then it's going to maintain integrity
throughout the initial period. (Yes, at some future point, perhaps
days later when it's uploaded itself into computronium, the speed
of light will be a factor, and the integrity may dissolve as you
say, to the point that entities will be on the 1cm scale. But we
don't know that they wouldn't be quite a bit larger than that.)
> Why did the superchicken cross the galaxy? To breed on the other side.
>
>> This leads to the picture that ten years ago I talked about with friends
>> that I called "The Wind from Earth": until the top of a technological
>> sigmoid is reached here, Earth technology will rule. (I'm sure that
>> many have had the same idea.) Distant matter---as close as Neptune or
>> as distant as galactic center---will never catch up, but will feel
>> a technological gradient flowing from Earth. Life for them will be
>> a constant struggle trying to determine just how subversive are the
>> latest extremely advanced algorithms (patterns) sent from Earth.
>
> I think what you would see is a succession of colonizing beings (control
> of the hardware layer is too important to be given away), wave after wave
> after the pioneers passed. Similar to what you see after volcanic
> eruptions.
I foresaw only one wave of physical expansion throughout the universe.
Here is the reason: while (if) more advanced products stream outward
from the Earth pinnacle, they'd suffer in two ways: one is that they
might not have enough mass to advance significantly while en route, and
two, relativistic time retardation. These factors combine to place
them at the mercy of distant first-wave material which has been
evolving furiously ever since it landed. The "wind from Earth"
will be in photons only, carrying its deadly algorithms.
(Those algorithms cannot be simply ignored, BTW. Relatively nearby
material may experiment with running the ones it judges to be okay,
putting overly conservative matter at a big disadvantage.)
Lee
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