From: Eugene Leitl (eugene.leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen.de)
Date: Tue Apr 20 1999 - 12:08:08 MDT
Lyle Burkhead writes:
> An ecosystem of hard organisms won't be any more gooey than an ecosystem of
> natural organisms.
Are you a hard organism, Lyle? Are redwoods? Fish?
A military autoreplicator is a weapon, deployment of which results in
a punctured equilibrium. It might serve as a nucleus from which an
entirely new beautiful ecosystems will spring, but even that is not
guaranteed.
But even if, we won't be there to see it. That's the whole point of
the Grey Goo, or a malign Singularity, you name it.
> will be an entire ecology of mechanical replicators. They will eat each
> other, reproduce, evolve, and in general play the same roles in their
> ecosystem that natural organisms play in the present ecosystem. This
> doesn't imply that they won't be a threat to natural life. Far from it.
Non sequitur. Doesn't look to me that way, and the threat is of a
magnitude where we cannot even tolerate 99.99% uncertainties.
'gene
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