From: John Clark (jonkc@worldnet.att.net)
Date: Fri Sep 03 1999 - 10:44:54 MDT
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky <sentience@pobox.com> Wrote:
>If it ever gets up to that point with military goo, we'll have lost so
>totally that - hell, I don't even have words for it. Try this: We'll
>be really, really, dead.
We'd be dead but the Earth might get a second chance. If Nanotech goo
took over the world things would certainly be bleak but perhaps not
totally hopeless, just gray not black. If the worst happened you'd have
an astronomical number of tiny machines smaller than bacteria each
with more computational power than a supercomputer. The machines
would be distributed more or less evenly over the surface of the Earth
in a layer several hundred to several thousand feet deep. The main energy
source on such a planet would be sunlight and chemical energy residing
in the sea of machines itself. A machine that could go higher and put his
fellows in the shade or was strong enough to eat his companions would be
at a advantage. Natural radiation would sometimes scramble the programming
of these machines and I would define life as information that changes by
natural selection. I think you see where I'm going with this.
I suspect that very soon the principles of Lamarck would predominate over
those of Darwin and the goo machines would start to inherit characteristics
that their parent had acquired, if so then physical evolution would happen as
swiftly as cultural evolution does today.
John K Clark jonkc@att.net
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