Re: Thinking about the future...
Peter C. McCluskey (pcm@rahul.net)
Wed, 4 Sep 1996 08:28:01 -0700
arkuat@factory.net (Eric Watt Forste) writes:
>Consider that an SI, as such, can only compute. If it wants to *do*
>something (and presumably if all it wanted to do was sit and compute, it
>would present no threat to human beings), it would need to build a vast
>network of sensorics and motorics. But instead of wasting time and
>resources on this intermediary means-project, it could work directly toward
>its ends by using the five billion sophisticated supercomputers (with their
>attached sophisticated sensorics and motorics) that we call human beings.
>It could also use the vast and inaccessible (except through the market)
>database of local information about resources that might be useful toward
>achieving its ends, but this information is lodged in human brains, and
If the SI is a recent upload, that will almost certainly be true,
but what if, as Drexler suggests, the SI's evolve because someone
throughs enough computing power at it to repeat the processes by which
intelligence evolved on earth. Then the SI's will be part of a society
and an ecosystem that evolved with them, and the additional society
that they could find in the external world wouldn't necessarily be any
more valuable to them than Africa or China are to most of us.
--
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Peter McCluskey | | The theory gives the answers,
pcm@rahul.net | http://www.rahul.net/pcm | not the theorist. - Allen Newell
pcm@quote.com | http://www.quote.com |