At 4:38 PM -0500 3/15/01, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote:
> > How do you even know or enforce what someone else does with their
>> computronium?
>
>You own and control your own computronium, but you control it through the
>Sysop API, and trying to violate citizenship rights will result in an API
>error. If we're in a sim with no citizenship rights, then we are so
>totally, utterly screwed that there is really very little that I can think
>of to do about it.
This is what bugs me the most about the Sysop and everything related
to it (e.g. Friendliness, etc.). *My* nanobots are going to create
*my* computorium, only to have the Sysop say, sorry, you can't do
that because it's not very Friendly, despite the fact that this is
still *my* computorium. In my opinion, most of the problems
throughout history stem from the fact that someone else was trying to
control resources that don't belong to them and have resulted in a
mentality that is detrimental to free society, almost forcing the
continuation of the system because most people are not able to think
of the best actions they could make if they were free to do so,
unless they are throughly re educated. With SIs, re education should
not take much time at all, just a little re coding. This will be
even easier with AIs, who can be designed from the ground up not to
learn how to act when someone else is in control of vis resources.
Hopefully, most everyone on this list has already accepted that
anarchy results in optimization. With the intelligence of SIs and
their speed of thought, common arguments against anarchy (sure, it
optimizes, but people are too stupid and too slow for it to work
effeciently, which are only half true anyway) are beaten.
Maybe it comes down to making this choice: would one rather live
free yet at the risk of destruction or inside a cage but safe from
all but universe level destruction. I have chosen the former, but
maybe Eliezer has chosen the latter.
Of corse, either choice is better than what we have now: a cage with
sharp spikes sticking inwards that could kill at any time. :-/
-- Gordon Worley http://www.rbisland.cx/ mailto:redbird@rbisland.cx PGP Fingerprint: C462 FA84 B811 3501 9010 20D2 6EF3 77F7 BBD3 B003
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