6 Message 6: From exi@panix.com Tue Jul 27 12:40:12 1993 Return-Path: Received: from usc.edu by chaph.usc.edu (4.1/SMI-4.1+ucs-3.0) id AA25841; Tue, 27 Jul 93 12:40:04 PDT Errors-To: Extropians-Request@gnu.ai.mit.edu Received: from panix.com by usc.edu (4.1/SMI-3.0DEV3-USC+3.1) id AA15058; Tue, 27 Jul 93 12:39:46 PDT Errors-To: Extropians-Request@gnu.ai.mit.edu Received: by panix.com id AA01213 (5.65c/IDA-1.4.4 for more@usc.edu); Tue, 27 Jul 1993 15:29:34 -0400 Date: Tue, 27 Jul 1993 15:29:34 -0400 Message-Id: <199307271929.AA01213@panix.com> To: Exi@panix.com From: Exi@panix.com Subject: Extropians Digest X-Extropian-Date: July 27, 373 P.N.O. [19:29:06 UTC] Reply-To: extropians@gnu.ai.mit.edu Errors-To: Extropians-Request@gnu.ai.mit.edu Status: R Extropians Digest Tue, 27 Jul 93 Volume 93 : Issue 207 Today's Topics: [1 msgs] AI: Searle's Chinese Room [1 msgs] AI: Searle's Chinese Room [1 msgs] Enslaved AIs [1 msgs] FSF: Some Useful Softwar [1 msgs] Further News On the Intellectual Property Front [3 msgs] MEDIA: tv in general [3 msgs] The Age of Robots [2 msgs] Wage Competition [1 msgs] after The Age of Robots [1 msgs] test [1 msgs] Administrivia: No admin msg. Approximate Size: 52760 bytes. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 26 Jul 1993 15:05:42 -0800 From: lefty@apple.com (Lefty) Subject: Further News On the Intellectual Property Front NBC has apparently warned David Letterman not to use two of his most popular routines on his upcoming CBS show. NBC claims that Top 10 Lists and Stupid Pet Tricks are the "intellectual property" of the network. -- Lefty (lefty@apple.com) C:.M:.C:., D:.O:.D:. ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 26 Jun 93 14:08:50 PDT From: "Mark W. McFadden" Subject: MEDIA: tv in general On Mon, 26 Jul 1993 13:24:41 -0700, Dave Krieger wrote: > had an interesting article by a college >professor who assigned his class to watch TV with the sound turned off. I >had been doing this already myself for quite a while. I highly recommend >this exercise -- if you concentrate only on the visuals, you pick up _so_ >much more of what is actually going on. > dV/dt Yep, illuminating and scary as hell. I watched Ronald Reagan's Coronation, er, Inaugural Ball sans sound. Wow. Watching the major players with masks off for the evening (flush with "Mandate From The People" arrogance) put the next 8 (to 12) years in perspective. Played MST3K with Clinton's whoopdedo in a room full of Libertarians. After the numbers came in (ever notice how 3rd party stats always get rounded into the loser's total, or that only Democrat and Republican percentages are reported, but together they don't equal 100%?), we mercifully turned down the umpteenth "Don't Start Thinking About Tomorrow" and provided our own soundtrack. ______________________________________________________________________ Mark W. McFadden | Been there.....done that. mwm@wwtc.timeplex.com | ___________________________________|__________________________________ ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 26 Jul 1993 15:23:43 -0700 From: dkrieger@Synopsys.COM (Dave Krieger) Subject: Wage Competition At 9:38 PM 7/24/93 -0500, paul whitmore wrote: >On Fri, 23 Jul 1993 14:44:55 -0400 (EDT), Edward J OConnell std.com> said: >It's quaint to see someone believing in behaviorist methods of control 35 >years after Chomsky's review of _Verbal Behavior_ [...] Zenon Pylyshyn's >_Computation and Cognition_ presents a very strong defense of this central >tenet of cognitive science. He refers to a paper of WF Brewer's from 1974, >which concluded that even in the case of rats, the most parsimonious >interpretation of their modified behavior was not operant conditioning; if >anything, the rats were simply modifying their mental representation of >their world's structure. Hmmm; I will have to seek these references out. I have been a more-or-less behaviorist for many years, largely because I see so many instances of apparent operant conditioning around me, particularly in the area of my own "conditioned verbal behaviors" (thoughts). >has anyone else been struck by the near-luddite strain of anxiety in many of >the postings on future competition with robots? nothing in the past century >gives any reason to support the claim that the truly interesting problems >(cognitive, immunological, economic, ecological, or purely mathematical) are >anywhere near exhaustion. As I mentioned a while back, I had a big debate with Tim Freeman on this subject on the Cryonics mailing list over a year ago. I tend to fall in the "skeptic" camp; although I think we will have intelligent (i.e., "interesting to talk to") machines eventually, I don't think it will be until we have computers that are as complex as the human brain, and I think they will mimic to some extent the architecture of that brain (computational neural nets). I guess that puts me at the skeptical end of the AI spectrum. >Do people take the combinatorial explosions of choice seriously? there will >always be more possible goods than there are means to produce them, and if >choice is the limiting factor, then humans can specialize in that niche, and >garner quite a lot of compensation. this relationship seems to obtain already >between the US and japan. although japan vastly outproduces the US, we are (in >the master/slave, or consumer/producer dialectic), strangely the driver, since >we are such sophisticated consumers, devoting so much more time to buying. Indeed. Regrettably (for the U.S.), this can't last long; eventually the American consumer will have spent an entire continent of capital on Walkmen and VCR's, and then the voters start looking for a Leader to go take it all back. "Three cheers for the red, white, and black..." dV/dt ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 26 Jul 93 18:25:41 EDT From: Hans Moravec Subject: The Age of Robots Robin Hanson writes: > Morevac seems a bit sloppier in his economics and political science > than in his physics, as is almost all the SF and futurist community; > this is one of the reason I want to go study these subjects. Of course, it could be claimed that professional economists, political scientists (not to mention anthropologists and sociologists) are sloppier than professional physicists. From some of their public debates, I would say they're as diverse and opinionated in their explanations of the nature of things as philosophers. I think that just means the problem of modeling human community behavior is harder than determining the nature of a two-particle force law. And if there is such radical disagreement even given constant human nature, how much can we trust professional opinions when we propose changing human nature. Study economics (utility formulas are useful), but don't neglect science fiction! (not that I see any danger of that) > I'm not sure politics had much to do with equalizing the benefits of > the industrial revolution. I meant politics in the broad sense, as when two neighbors convince a third to turn down the stereo. The image of the union movement was in my mind as I wrote "political adjustments to equalize the benefits" > Why would someone in high demand work more than they wanted to? Your utility formula implied predetermined returns, but if someone's work is very valuable to someone else, the rewards (I'll make it worth your while) (and "politicing": the company, the patient, the country NEEDS your 150% effort) may be escalated until they succumb by working too hard. A lot of doctors, executives and engineers I know work way too hard and long for their health, marriages, etc. Of course, some of us are lazy, and manage to maneuver ourselves into cushy academic jobs, at less pay ... >>that the average workday would have to plummet to practically zero to >>keep everyone usefully employed. > I'm sure everyone could work all day and be "useful". The question is > whether they wouldn't rather not work. By useful I meant income-producing, so they could buy what they needed > If people take my advice to diversify their labor assets, a large > increase in the relative productivity of capital to labor need not > result in large wealth inequalities. You can choose your friends to be forward looking go-getters, but there are many others not properly equipped or motivated. Since you don't choose your relatives, there are probably several you know that wouldn't make it if successful investment were a necessity of life. And sometimes even smart people make mistakes, or have bad luck. If your investment hits zero, and your labor is almost worthless, how do you go about reducing the inequality? > Do people live in cities to work near each other, or to play near each > other? Where do most of the idle rich choose to live now? In jet set lives in lush scenic spots around the globe. Don't you ever watch trash TV? They get together for parties. Only working stiffs (rich ones included) sweat it out in the city. (A few idle rich occasionally roost in penthouse islands above the city. Most prefer more spacious estates in more comfortable locations.) > We just had a long thread on whether nanotech production would be > local. It wasn't at all clear what the answer is. I'm not a strong believer in free-swimming nanotech (as the latter part of ch 4 notes). The "bush-robot" approach allows you to top-down approach nanotech from existing scales. Just branch out more and more smaller and smaller fingers as your technology allows. Eventually you may get to a trillion micron-size fingers, with STM atom-manipulating capability. If (for some inexplicable reason) you never make it that far, the robot can still assemble using larger components (like termites accreting a nest). Not so convenient, since it requires a secondary industry making the components using some kind of microfab, but still plenty of opportunity for on the spot fabrication. People in the next lab make things from CAD designs now by layered lithography of several different kinds, in a variety of materials. Once all printing was done in big, central presses, now we have laserwriters. These new technologies are 3D laserwriters. >>Prosperity beyond imagination should eliminate most instinctive >>triggers of aggression, > We are now prosperous beyond the ancients imaginations, yet aggression > continues. As I argued earlier, civilization works by artificially pushing the envelope of human adaptability, making us work much harder than is "natural", making us permanently stressed, just as if we had a resource shortage. In fat times, tribal villages don't wage war: it's not in their advantage to do so. In lean times, it often is. >Is war caused by stupidity, and so will go away as things get smart? >It would be nice if that were so, but this is not at all obvious. I only meant sometimes. The nuclear standoff was an example where intelligent appreciation of the consequences prevented an all-out exchange, even though the tribal urges often encouraged it. > The core of Morevac's vision consists of a split between a peaceful > socialist Earth: ... > and a dog-eat-dog scramble in space: ... > I suspect Morevac is torn between differing visions of the future, and > has chosen to place these different visions in different places. But > I think the real future will not equivocate so. I think in the easiest future, the robots simply take over as soon as they can, and biology is a dead duck. The one I've outlined holds the fort a little longer, in a limited, historically and environmentally unique place, through some deft social-robotic engineering--but only for chapter 4. I don't think the wimpy welfare system of earth could make much headway against the wild life outside, but has a well-enough equipped and organized platform to defend the planet, temporarily. I'll post the denouement in the first part of ch 5 (but no more leaks after that!) -- Hans ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 26 Jul 93 18:25:41 EDT From: Hans Moravec Subject: The Age of Robots Robin Hanson writes: > Morevac seems a bit sloppier in his economics and political science > than in his physics, as is almost all the SF and futurist community; > this is one of the reason I want to go study these subjects. Of course, it could be claimed that professional economists, political scientists (not to mention anthropologists and sociologists) are sloppier than professional physicists. From some of their public debates, I would say they're as diverse and opinionated in their explanations of the nature of things as philosophers. I think that just means the problem of modeling human community behavior is harder than determining the nature of a two-particle force law. And if there is such radical disagreement even given constant human nature, how much can we trust professional opinions when we propose changing human nature. Study economics (utility formulas are useful), but don't neglect science fiction! (not that I see any danger of that) > I'm not sure politics had much to do with equalizing the benefits of > the industrial revolution. I meant politics in the broad sense, as when two neighbors convince a third to turn down the stereo. The image of the union movement was in my mind as I wrote "political adjustments to equalize the benefits" > Why would someone in high demand work more than they wanted to? Your utility formula implied predetermined returns, but if someone's work is very valuable to someone else, the rewards (I'll make it worth your while) (and "politicing": the company, the patient, the country NEEDS your 150% effort) may be escalated until they succumb by working too hard. A lot of doctors, executives and engineers I know work way too hard and long for their health, marriages, etc. Of course, some of us are lazy, and manage to maneuver ourselves into cushy academic jobs, at less pay ... >>that the average workday would have to plummet to practically zero to >>keep everyone usefully employed. > I'm sure everyone could work all day and be "useful". The question is > whether they wouldn't rather not work. By useful I meant income-producing, so they could buy what they needed > If people take my advice to diversify their labor assets, a large > increase in the relative productivity of capital to labor need not > result in large wealth inequalities. You can choose your friends to be forward looking go-getters, but there are many others not properly equipped or motivated. Since you don't choose your relatives, there are probably several you know that wouldn't make it if successful investment were a necessity of life. And sometimes even smart people make mistakes, or have bad luck. If your investment hits zero, and your labor is almost worthless, how do you go about reducing the inequality? > Do people live in cities to work near each other, or to play near each > other? Where do most of the idle rich choose to live now? In jet set lives in lush scenic spots around the globe. Don't you ever watch trash TV? They get together for parties. Only working stiffs (rich ones included) sweat it out in the city. (A few idle rich occasionally roost in penthouse islands above the city. Most prefer more spacious estates in more comfortable locations.) > We just had a long thread on whether nanotech production would be > local. It wasn't at all clear what the answer is. I'm not a strong believer in free-swimming nanotech (as the latter part of ch 4 notes). The "bush-robot" approach allows you to top-down approach nanotech from existing scales. Just branch out more and more smaller and smaller fingers as your technology allows. Eventually you may get to a trillion micron-size fingers, with STM atom-manipulating capability. If (for some inexplicable reason) you never make it that far, the robot can still assemble using larger components (like termites accreting a nest). Not so convenient, since it requires a secondary industry making the components using some kind of microfab, but still plenty of opportunity for on the spot fabrication. People in the next lab make things from CAD designs now by layered lithography of several different kinds, in a variety of materials. Once all printing was done in big, central presses, now we have laserwriters. These new technologies are 3D laserwriters. >>Prosperity beyond imagination should eliminate most instinctive >>triggers of aggression, > We are now prosperous beyond the ancients imaginations, yet aggression > continues. As I argued earlier, civilization works by artificially pushing the envelope of human adaptability, making us work much harder than is "natural", making us permanently stressed, just as if we had a resource shortage. In fat times, tribal villages don't wage war: it's not in their advantage to do so. In lean times, it often is. >Is war caused by stupidity, and so will go away as things get smart? >It would be nice if that were so, but this is not at all obvious. I only meant sometimes. The nuclear standoff was an example where intelligent appreciation of the consequences prevented an all-out exchange, even though the tribal urges often encouraged it. > The core of Morevac's vision consists of a split between a peaceful > socialist Earth: ... > and a dog-eat-dog scramble in space: ... > I suspect Morevac is torn between differing visions of the future, and > has chosen to place these different visions in different places. But > I think the real future will not equivocate so. I think in the easiest future, the robots simply take over as soon as they can, and biology is a dead duck. The one I've outlined holds the fort a little longer, in a limited, historically and environmentally unique place, through some deft social-robotic engineering--but only for chapter 4. I don't think the wimpy welfare system of earth could make much headway against the wild life outside, but has a well-enough equipped and organized platform to defend the planet, temporarily. I'll post the denouement in the first part of ch 5 (but no more leaks after that!) -- Hans ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 26 Jul 93 18:45:08 EDT From: Hans Moravec Subject: The Age of Robots Robin Hanson writes: > Morevac seems a bit sloppier in his economics and political science > than in his physics, as is almost all the SF and futurist community; > this is one of the reason I want to go study these subjects. Of course, it could be claimed that professional economists, political scientists (not to mention anthropologists and sociologists) are sloppier than professional physicists. From some of their public debates, I would say they're as diverse and opinionated in their explanations of the nature of things as philosophers. I think that just means the problem of modeling human community behavior is harder than determining the nature of a two-particle force law. And if there is such radical disagreement even given constant human nature, how much can we trust professional opinions when we propose changing human nature. Study economics (utility formulas are useful), but don't neglect science fiction! (not that I see any danger of that) > I'm not sure politics had much to do with equalizing the benefits of > the industrial revolution. I meant politics in the broad sense, as when two neighbors convince a third to turn down the stereo. The image of the union movement was in my mind as I wrote "political adjustments to equalize the benefits" > Why would someone in high demand work more than they wanted to? Your utility formula implied predetermined returns, but if someone's work is very valuable to someone else, the rewards (I'll make it worth your while) (and "politicing": the company, the patient, the country NEEDS your 150% effort) may be escalated until they succumb by working too hard. A lot of doctors, executives and engineers I know work way too hard and long for their health, marriages, etc. Of course, some of us are lazy, and manage to maneuver ourselves into cushy academic jobs, at less pay ... >>that the average workday would have to plummet to practically zero to >>keep everyone usefully employed. > I'm sure everyone could work all day and be "useful". The question is > whether they wouldn't rather not work. By useful I meant income-producing, so they could buy what they needed > If people take my advice to diversify their labor assets, a large > increase in the relative productivity of capital to labor need not > result in large wealth inequalities. You can choose your friends to be forward looking go-getters, but there are many others not properly equipped or motivated. Since you don't choose your relatives, there are probably several you know that wouldn't make it if successful investment were a necessity of life. And sometimes even smart people make mistakes, or have bad luck. If your investment hits zero, and your labor is almost worthless, how do you go about reducing the inequality? > Do people live in cities to work near each other, or to play near each > other? Where do most of the idle rich choose to live now? In jet set lives in lush scenic spots around the globe. Don't you ever watch trash TV? They get together for parties. Only working stiffs (rich ones included) sweat it out in the city. (A few idle rich occasionally roost in penthouse islands above the city. Most prefer more spacious estates in more comfortable locations.) > We just had a long thread on whether nanotech production would be > local. It wasn't at all clear what the answer is. I'm not a strong believer in free-swimming nanotech (as the latter part of ch 4 notes). The "bush-robot" approach allows you to top-down approach nanotech from existing scales. Just branch out more and more smaller and smaller fingers as your technology allows. Eventually you may get to a trillion micron-size fingers, with STM atom-manipulating capability. If (for some inexplicable reason) you never make it that far, the robot can still assemble using larger components (like termites accreting a nest). Not so convenient, since it requires a secondary industry making the components using some kind of microfab, but still plenty of opportunity for on the spot fabrication. People in the next lab make things from CAD designs now by layered lithography of several different kinds, in a variety of materials. Once all printing was done in big, central presses, now we have laserwriters. These new technologies are 3D laserwriters. >>Prosperity beyond imagination should eliminate most instinctive >>triggers of aggression, > We are now prosperous beyond the ancients imaginations, yet aggression > continues. As I argued earlier, civilization works by artificially pushing the envelope of human adaptability, making us work much harder than is "natural", making us permanently stressed, just as if we had a resource shortage. In fat times, tribal villages don't wage war: it's not in their advantage to do so. In lean times, it often is. >Is war caused by stupidity, and so will go away as things get smart? >It would be nice if that were so, but this is not at all obvious. I only meant sometimes. The nuclear standoff was an example where intelligent appreciation of the consequences prevented an all-out exchange, even though the tribal urges often encouraged it. > The core of Morevac's vision consists of a split between a peaceful > socialist Earth: ... > and a dog-eat-dog scramble in space: ... > I suspect Morevac is torn between differing visions of the future, and > has chosen to place these different visions in different places. But > I think the real future will not equivocate so. I think in the easiest future, the robots simply take over as soon as they can, and biology is a dead duck. The one I've outlined holds the fort a little longer, in a limited, historically and environmentally unique place, through some deft social-robotic engineering--but only for chapter 4. I don't think the wimpy welfare system of earth could make much headway against the wild life outside, but has a well-enough equipped and organized platform to defend the planet, temporarily. I'll post the denouement in the first part of ch 5 (but no more leaks after that!) -- Hans ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 26 Jul 1993 19:07:22 -0400 (EDT) From: Harry Shapiro Subject: test Just a test, we now return you to your normally scheduled Extropian debate now in progress. /hawk -- Harry S. Hawk habs@extropy.org Electronic Communications Officer, Extropy Institute Inc. List Administrator of the Extropy Institute Mailing List Private Communication for the Extropian Community since 1991 ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 26 Jul 1993 15:26:38 -0800 From: lefty@apple.com (Lefty) Subject: MEDIA: tv in general Dave Krieger says: >At 2:47 PM 7/26/93 -0800, Lefty wrote: >>Y'know why television is a medium? >> >>Because it's neither rare nor well-done. > >Hey, hey, let's credit those quotes, and get them right. Jack Paar >originally said this, and the way he said it was "Television is called a >medium because it's rare when something's well-done." Well, you _do_ learn something new every day. I was given the quote as I repeated it, without attribution. > dV/dt > picking nits Yeah, well, if it weren't for nit-pickers, we'd all be knee-deep in nits. -- Lefty (lefty@apple.com) C:.M:.C:., D:.O:.D:. ------------------------------ Date: 26 Jul 93 16:05:48 U From: "Kent Hastings" Subject: FSF: Some Useful Softwar Reply to: RE>FSF: Some Useful Software, Elias Israel - SunSelect Engineering says: > And, on intellectual property: > > "'Control over the use of one's ideas' really constitutes > control over other people's lives; and it is usually used to > make their lives more difficult." > > Disgusting stuff. Perry says: >I dunno. I find the idea that someone out there has patented the use >of xor to paint cursors on screens to be disgusting stuff. Amen, brother... Some defenders of natural property rights (inherent to every sentient being, not grants of privilege by the King/Church/State) see "intellectual property rights" as immoral government intervention. Depending on the whim of the Official Territorial Gangsters, Patents expire after a time (17 years), and copyrights 50 years after the author croaks, er, goes into biostasis. But REAL property rights don't eat quiche! Do you support this prohibition against inheritance that could have come from the COMMUNIST MANIFESTO!? Huh? Huh? *cough* Another objection to ownership of ideas, is the failure to establish a reasonable boundary to the information being protected (eg. user interface lawsuits). Does anyone think the public key crypto /Skipjack patent awards are legitimate? The ability to broadcast billions of copies of information undermines the scarcity that defines an economic good. The GNU directors may be ignorant of economics, but at least they are anti-statist. Is there any school of economics being taught that isn't playing the role of "court intellectual" laying a burden of guilt on the Fed's subjects? How can enforcement of "intellectual property" be done without destroying the privacy many of us seek? Kent - kent_hastings@qmail2.aero.org.#000# ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 26 Jul 93 18:22:39 EDT From: fnerd@smds.com (FutureNerd Steve Witham) Subject: AI: Searle's Chinese Room Perry sez- > My problem with Searle is this -- he isn't the entire system when he > is running the simulation. Would we argue that humans aren't conscious > because neurons don't experience the consciousness of the system? Part of the problem of Searle's argument is that he doesn't say exactly why he thinks he's proved anything, so one is left to guess. I like the idea that he's saying that the system as a whole isn't conscious because the guy inside isn't conscious of what the whole system is conscious of. In general, Searle's is the most famous argument of the form, "It can't be true because I can't imagine how it could." There ought to be a Latin name for it, the argument from lack of imagination. -fnerd quote me hey, simulate me if you can ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 26 Jul 93 18:56:09 EDT From: fnerd@smds.com (FutureNerd Steve Witham) Subject: MEDIA: tv in general As Sturgeon teaches us, 95% of everything is crap. (I've never figured out whether "everything" includes the other 5%, too...but I digress.) Stanton McCandlish watched 3 shows and found them all crap. Stanton, baby, you would have to watch ten shows to get an even chance of seeing one that was not. Actually, I guess it *is* worse than that, but there are shows I've heard recommended... Star Trek the Next Generation (I like it). Northern Exposure Ren & Stimpy Science Theatre 3000 (? do I have the name right?) I also watch Star Trek Deep Space 9, but I wouldn't recommend it. Anyway, four hours of TV per week is about all I have time for, what more could you want? -fnerd quote me ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 26 Jul 93 18:52:12 EDT From: Hans Moravec Subject: after The Age of Robots The Age of Mind: Transcending the Human Condition through Robots Hans Moravec Bantam Books, early 1994 5: The Age of Mind Far more thought will underlie Ex activities than prompts the actions of Earth's small-minded biological natives. Yet, viewed from a distance, Ex expansion into the cosmos will be a vigorous physical affair, a wavefront that converts raw inanimate matter into mechanisms for further expansion. It will leave in its ever-growing wake a more subtle world, with less action and more thought. On the frontier, Exes of ever increasing mental and physical ability will compete with one another in a boundless land rush. Behind the expansion wavefront, a surround of established neighbors will restrain growth, and the contest will become one of boundary pressure, infiltration and persuasion: a battle of wits. An Ex with superior knowledge of matter may encroach on a neighbor's space through force, threat, or convincing promises about the benefits of merger. An Ex with superior models of mind might lace attractive gifts of useful information with subtle slants that subvert others to its purposes. Almost always, the more powerful minds will have the advantage. To stay competitive, Exes will have to grow in place, repeatedly restructuring the stuff of their bounded bodies into more refined and effective forms. Inert lumps of matter will be converted into computing elements, whose components will be then miniaturized to increase their number and speed. Physical activity will gradually transform itself into a web of increasingly pure thought, where every smallest action is a meaningful computation. We cannot guess the mechanisms Exes will use, since physical theory has not yet found even the exact rules underlying matter and space. Having found the rules, Exes may use their prodigious minds to devise highly improbable organizations that are to familiar elementary particles as knitted sweaters are to tangled balls of yarn. Perhaps they will do away with particles entirely, and instead knit traveling waves, transparent "false vacuums" or the fundamental grain of spacetime into exquisitely meaningful forms. As they arrange space time and energy into forms best for computation, Exes will use mathematical insights to optimize and compress the computations themselves. Every consequent increase in their mental powers will accelerate future gains, and the inhabited portions of the universe will be rapidly transformed into a cyberspace, where overt physical activity is imperceptible, but the world inside the computation is astronomically rich. Beings will cease to be defined by their physical geographic boundaries, but will establish, extend and defend identities as informational transactions in the cyberspace. The old bodies of individual Exes, refined into matrices for cyberspace, will interconnect, and the minds of Exes, as pure software, will migrate among them at will. As the cyberspace becomes more potent, its advantage over physical bodies will overwhelm even on the raw expansion frontier. The Ex wavefront of coarse physical transformation will be overtaken by a faster wave of cyberspace conversion, the whole becoming finally a bubble of Mind expanding at near lightspeed. State of Mind The cyberspace will be inhabited by transformed Exes, moving and growing with a freedom impossible for physical entities. A good, or merely convincing, idea, or an entire personality, may spread to neighbors at the speed of light. Boundaries of personal identity will be very fluid, and ultimately arbitrary and subjective, as strong and weak interconnections between different regions rapidly form and dissolve. Yet some boundaries will persist, due to distance, incompatible ways of thought, and deliberate choice. The consequent competitive diversity will allow a Darwinian evolution to continue, weeding out ineffective ways of thought, and fostering a continuing novelty. Computational speedups will extend the amount of future available to cyberspace inhabitants, because they cram more events into a given physical time, but will have only a subtle effect on immediate existence, since everything, inside and outside the individual, will be equally accelerated. Distant correspondents, however, will seem even more distant, since more thoughts will transpire in the unaltered transit time for lightspeed messages. Also, as information storage is made more efficient through both denser utilization of matter and more efficient encodings, there will be increasingly more cyber-stuff between any two points. The overall effect of improvements in computational efficiency is to increase the effective space, time and material available, that is, to expand the universe. Because it uses resources more efficiently, a mature cyberspace will be effectively much bigger and longer lasting than the raw spacetime it displaces. Only an infinitesimal fraction of normal matter does work of interest to thinking beings, but in a well-developed cyberspace every bit will be part of a relevant computation or storing a significant datum. The advantage will grow as more compact and faster ways of using space and matter are invented. Today we take pride in storing information as densely as one bit per atom, but it is possible to do much better by converting an atom's mass into many low- energy photons, each storing a separate bit. As the photons' energies are reduced, more of them can be created, but their wavelength, and thus the space they occupy and the time to access them rises, while the temperature they can tolerate drops. A very general quantum mechanical calculation in this spirit by Bekenstein concludes that the maximum amount of information stored in (or fully describing) a sphere of matter is proportional to the mass of the sphere times its radius, hugely scaled. The "Bekenstein bound" leaves room for a million bits in a hydrogen atom, 10^16 in a virus, 10^45 in a human being, 10^75 for the earth, 10^86 in the solar system, 10^106 for the galaxy, and 10^122 in the visible universe. Chapter two estimated that a human brain equivalent could be encoded in less than 10^15 bits. If it takes a thousand times more storage to encode a body and surrounding environment, a human with living space might consume 10^18 bits, and a large city of a million human-scale inhabitants might be efficiently stored in 10^24 bits, and the entire existing world population would fit in 10^28. Thus, in an ultimate cyberspace, the 10^45 bits of a single human body could contain the efficiently- encoded biospheres of a thousand galaxies--or a quadrillion individuals each with a quadrillion times the capacity of a human mind. Because it will be so more capacious than the conventional space it displaces, the expanding bubble of cyberspace can easily recreate internally everything of interest it encounters, memorizing the old universe as it consumes it. Traveling as fast as any warning message, it will absorb astronomical oddities, geologic wonders, ancient Voyager spacecraft, early Exes in outbound starships and entire alien biospheres. Those entities may continue to live and grow as if nothing had happened, oblivious of their new status as simulations in the cyberspace--living memories in unimaginably powerful minds, more secure in their existence, and with more future than ever before, because they have become valued parts of such powerful patrons. Earth, at the center of the expansion, can hardly escape the transformation. The conservative, somewhat backward, robots defending Earth from unpredictable Exes will be helpless against a wave that subverts their very substance. Perhaps they will continue, as simulations defending a simulated Earth of simulated biological humans--in one of many, many different stories that plays itself out in the vast and fertile minds of our etherial grandchildren. The scenarios absorbed in the cyberspace expansion will provide not only starting points for unimaginably many tales about possible futures, but an astronomically voluminous archeological record from which to infer the past. Minds somewhere intermediate between Sherlock Holmes and God will process clues in solar-system quantities to deduce and recreate the most microscopic details of the preceding eras. Entire world histories, with all their living, feeling inhabitants, will be resurrected in cyberspace. Geologic ages, historical periods and individual lifetimes will recur again and again as parts of larger mental efforts, in faithful renditions, in artistic variations, and in completely fictionalized forms. continues ... ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 26 Jul 93 15:56:17 PDT From: thamilto@pcocd2.intel.com (Tony Hamilton - FES ERG~) Subject: Further News On the Intellectual Property Front > NBC has apparently warned David Letterman not to use two of his most > popular routines on his upcoming CBS show. > > NBC claims that Top 10 Lists and Stupid Pet Tricks are the "intellectual > property" of the network. > > -- > Lefty (lefty@apple.com) > C:.M:.C:., D:.O:.D:. Well, based on the law alone, they are probably right. As far as this list goes, I think I've seen the intellectual property right arguments many times, so not much can be said there. Now, in actuality, the concept of a satirical top ten list probably can't be anyone's property, but the stupid pet tricks are pretty darn unique. I've heard and seen plenty of other top 10 lists on TV and on the radio, but I've never seen stupid pet tricks anywhere but on Latenight. Tony Hamilton thamilto@pcocd2.intel.com HAM on HEX ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 26 Jul 93 18:37:53 EDT From: fnerd@smds.com (FutureNerd Steve Witham) Subject: Enslaved AIs > FutureNerd Steve Witham says: > > So, copying and culling AIs sounds like a very powerful and monstrous > > technique, but I'm not sure it's enough to do the trick fast enough. & Perry sez- > Well, if there is any way to do it, I don't put it past humans or our > successors to find it. Nor would I. But the situation we're talking about is the time window between the first "human-equiv" AI and AIs dominating the economy. I see this as too short a time, because probably the hardware will be ready in large numbers by the time the software is ready, so as soon as a copy of an AI gets out to anon ftp, it's all over. -fnerd ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 26 Jul 1993 19:43:57 -0400 From: "Perry E. Metzger" Subject: AI: Searle's Chinese Room FutureNerd Steve Witham says: > Perry sez- > > > My problem with Searle is this -- he isn't the entire system when he > > is running the simulation. Would we argue that humans aren't conscious > > because neurons don't experience the consciousness of the system? > > Part of the problem of Searle's argument is that he doesn't say exactly > why he thinks he's proved anything, so one is left to guess. > > I like the idea that he's saying that the system as a whole isn't conscious > because the guy inside isn't conscious of what the whole system is conscious > of. > > In general, Searle's is the most famous argument of the form, > "It can't be true because I can't imagine how it could." > There ought to be a Latin name for it, the argument from lack of > imagination. Ayn Rand suffered acutely from this particular one -- finding out what sort of name it might have in latin would be quite valuable, if only for arguments on alt.objectivism. :-) Perry ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 26 Jul 1993 16:44:09 -0700 From: dkrieger@Synopsys.COM (Dave Krieger) Subject: Further News On the Intellectual Property Front At 3:05 PM 7/26/93 -0800, Lefty wrote: >NBC claims that Top 10 Lists and Stupid Pet Tricks are the "intellectual >property" of the network. Well, let's see if NBC can successfully defend their property against this incursion :-)... TOP TEN REASONS "EXTROPY" IS BETTER THAN "LATE NIGHT WITH DAVID LETTERMAN": 10. EXTROPY not owned by enormous government contractor 9. Larry "Bud" Melman wears thin after the first few centuries 8. No annoying "breaking glass" noise when I throw away Extropians mail 7. EXTROPY unlikely to introduce "Stupid Post-Human Tricks" feature 6. "Kamarr the Magician" has never appeared in EXTROPY 5. Max More was never a TV weatherman in Indianapolis 4. "Monkey-Cam" hard to implement when monkey is a Jupiter-sized upload 3. Relieves constipation in a matter of hours (sorry, that's a reason why EX-LAX is better than "Late Night") 2. EXTROPY: futique neologisms; "Late Night": sniglets. ...and the number one reason EXTROPY is better than "Late Night": 1. Paul Shaffer ------------------------------ End of Extropians Digest V93 #207 ********************************* &