From: Nick Bostrom (bostrom@ndirect.co.uk)
Date: Tue Sep 08 1998 - 18:27:57 MDT
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote:
> 1. Leakage: (Moderate probability.)
> Our Universe is both inhospitable to PSEs and easily
> escapable. Any SI immediately "leaks out", perhaps leaving a few
> Transcendent artifacts behind, but still leaving an untouched world
> to humanity. Note that this incorporates Bostrum's noncompetitive
> ecology.
I presume you are referring to the singleton thesis? It could be
misleading to say that it implies a noncompetitive ecology, since
*internally* the singleton could choose to embody a tooth-and-claw
ecology if it wanted to.
I defined a singleton as:
A singleton is a power which does not face any external competition;
its behaviour is constrained only by physical nature and by
self-imposed standards.
And:
The singleton thesis is that a permanent
singleton will form in the non-distant future.
(I have a bulky but very unfinished paper-in-progress at
http://www.hedweb.com/nickb/singleton.html.)
Nick Bostrom
http://www.hedweb.com/nickb n.bostrom@lse.ac.uk
Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method
London School of Economics
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