> As we are on the outskirts of the Singularity already, trying to keep
> himself _very_ informed while accreting personal wealth (=a richer set of
> possible future ego trajectories) would seem a pretty good strategy. Of
> course being part of the team about to transcend would be even better ;)
Hmm, keeping informed, accreting wealth and understanding transcension
- sounds a lot like what we are trying to do on this list. Maybe we
should start the transcension team :-)
> There is no way how flesh would be able to persist even halfway through a
> Darwinian Singularity (does anybody disagree?).
Yes, I of course disagree (being the resident conservative :-). Sure,
a period of fast, turbulent change with nanotechnology around would be
very risky for biology. But it doesn't follow that it would
necessarily be replaced with something else. For example, the Earth
might simply turn out to be too inconvenient and cumbersome (too
little energy, too much gravity and oxygene) for the godlings, so they
go out in space to gobble carbonaceous asteroids instead. We simply
can't estimate if there will be a carnevale or not right now.
> Singularity is impossible without the strong AI hypothesis not being true.
> Brains the size of a planet are a bit difficult to do with plain wetware.
Depends on how large percentage of the mass you want to have as
information processing elements. I have no problem imagining
planet-covering forests with brains linked by root networks, or even a
biological nanotech jupiter brain. Not likely, but possible in
principle.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y