Re: singleton and memetics

From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Fri Nov 20 1998 - 03:28:08 MST


"Eliezer S. Yudkowsky" <sentience@pobox.com> writes:

> For what it's worth, my guess is that there will not be duplicated
> calculations or module-based programming, at least if efficiency is being
> maximized.

You must factor robustness into efficiency. Having just one copy of
each algorithm is a bad idea if there is any risk of it being damaged
or unavailable (which can be a big problem for a distributed mind;
"Darn! I need my low temperature manipulation skills, but I left them
in the outer solar system!"). Another factor to think of is
evolvability: is the system designed from scratch, or the result of a
combination of many systems? You cannot just ignore legacy systems,
and having a non-modular system makes change very hard.

You don't find any monoliths in nature.

> Two things to consider:
> 1) There's a lot of duplicated processing in the human race. Is it really
> necessary to have five billion copies of the walking algorithm?

Yes, unless you want that a communications glitch with the central
server makes us all temporarily handicapped.

> 2) Ideal efficiency requires that there be only one Post-Singularity Entity,
> among all the races of all the Universes.

Sounds Tipleresque. But efficiency for what end? If the goal is not
well-defined or requires complex information top-down solutions like
you propose tend to be inferior to bottom-up solutions, even if they
involve a high amount of redundancy and diversity.

-- 
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Anders Sandberg                                      Towards Ascension!
asa@nada.kth.se                            http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/
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