Eliezer said:
> There's enough computing power on the Internet right now - or, as Eugene
> Leitl and Christine Peterson prefer to call it, "poorly defended"
> computing power - for transhumanity.
If a human runs at 10^16+ ops and the net is ~10^9 (ops) x 10^10 machines
you have to argue that 1 in 1000 machines are (a) connected to the net
(not! most are behind firewalls) and (b) are vulnerable. I've been
bitten once and subsequently several of my machines went behind the lines.
So they exist but I doubt you can get to them. If I'm typical you can't
claim the net is "poorly defended" (and I focus much less attention on
security than most corporations).
Even if the net is equal to 1 human equivalent -- that doesn't let you
evolve rapidly because humans don't have any idea how to comprehend
themselves currently or self-evolve. You don't have the excess capacity
to make copies and prune the non-successful variants. You can argue
that we may get there at some point in the future but I would object
to the statement that "we are there now". (So we are in "slow" evolution
mode now even from the most optimistic perspectives.)
> You can get a custom DNA sequence
> synthesized and an arbitrary DNA sequence turned into protein, so if you
> can crack protein folding you can get drextech, in, oh, call it three or
> four days with FedEx, or one or two days if you assume that the newborn
> can spend millions of dollars without tipping anyone off.
Aha, precisely the point -- you have to have something smart enough to
play "who wants to be a millionaire" without giving itself away. Its
doubtful that we are there yet so at best they self-evolve only very
slowly and have to save their pennies before you can transform that
into something real.
Robert
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Mon May 28 2001 - 10:00:08 MDT