From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Wed Sep 13 2000 - 23:38:58 MDT
Samantha Atkins wrote:
>
> Eugene Leitl wrote:
> >
> > Abundance mode? For how long? There aren't that many atoms in the
> > solar system...
>
> With nanotech on the
> horizon we will most likely be in abundance mode on earth for most
> physical goods within the next 4-5 decades...
Actually, Eugene's suggestion on this score makes sense. After all, running
at a millionfold or billionfold speedup, and with some humans still wanting to
reproduce, it's easily conceivable that all the Solar System's resources will
be sucked up within the first few hours.
My suggestion to the Sysop would be to impose a minimum resource requirement
before someone creates a child; the child has to have at least enough
computational resources to run at a reasonable speed with a reasonably-sized
mind until the Big Crunch. This way, even if people try to reproduce at the
maximum possible speed using their share of the Solar System, standards of
living will never drop unacceptably.
-- -- -- -- --
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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