From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Tue Sep 03 2002 - 06:05:16 MDT
gts wrote:
> Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote:
>
>
>> Okay, but who is going to repair the repair mechanisms?
>
>
>>> Suppose you have N repair systems..... ....which means that the
>>> total risk, summed over the infinite series, can be bounded (and
>>> small).
>>
>
> I have no problem with that. But given enough time the odds will
> eventually catch up to us, meaning that our existence in time must
> still be finite.
No, gts. Say you start out with 16 repair systems and the odds of any
given repair system failing, over say the course of one millennium, are
1/2. The total odds of all 16 repair systems failing in the same
millennium, which we'll assume for the sake of argument is enough to kill
the system, will be 1/65536. Then suppose that you add 1 repair system
every millennium (linear growth rate). Your *total* risk of dying over
your *entire* infinite lifespan is 1/32768. Not 1/32768 per millennium.
1/32768 *total*.
-- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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