hal@finney.org writes:
> The watchmakers seem utterly implausible to me. Industrial equipment
> works on the basis of complex logic that can't reasonably be understood
> by animals. As a first step to improving a device, it is necessary
> to understand what it does. There is no way an animal could do that,
> for a coffee maker or an energy shield. How would they know what would
> make coffee taste better?
Couldn't they be making micro-adjustments to the coffee maker and see
how the humans respond? Not to please them, but when humans have better
coffee they worry about coffee less and have more time to invent new
technology, which the watchmakers (or Moties) thrive in.
Eventually we'd just sit back and think up stuff while tireless Moties
implement our ideas then constantly improve them.
Scary thought: the first thing that came to mind when envisioning how
such creatures (that thrive in ever higher density computational
environments) might come to be is via coercively mandated percentages of
cpu area, per Vinge's ideas re ubiquituous law enforcement.
-Mike
-- ====================================================================== Michael Wiik Principal Messagenet Communications Research Washington DC Area Internet and WWW Consultants http://messagenet.com mwiik@messagenet.com ======================================================================
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