From: Eugene Leitl (eugene.leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen.de)
Date: Thu Sep 14 2000 - 03:07:48 MDT
Samantha Atkins writes:
> It seems to me pretty silly to simply scale up humans as they are today
> and give them godlike abilities to be super-duper apes instead of merely
> slightly evolved ones. You won't sell much progress if that is the way
It seems to be pretty silly to assume we all silently transcend into a
society of homogenous gods, to sit in the virtual Pantheon until the
Universe's clock runs out (or forever, if we find some new physics).
> of it. Fortunately, changing ourselves is also massively enabled.
So we have a vastly expanded scope of modifications, and we all
synchronously restrict us to just a few? Is your list of mods same as
mine? You guarantee the population of independent agents iterating
such mods (and replicating the old-fashioned way) will never drift
apart? From the space of all possibilities, that is not exactly one of
more probable outcomes.
> Also, reproduction is much less turned to when they are a variety of
> other interesting things to do even among mere mortals. Lastly,
Last time I looked a subpopulation of humanity was surprisingly fecund
<insert favourite minorities joke here>. And not even counting the
nonhumanity, which doesn't care a fig about philosophy of Plato.
Again, you extrapolate from a snapshot.
> physical reproduction and all physical processes of incorporating
> physical materials are governed by physical speed limits. Not by how
Indeed.
> fast the AI can run. Trillions of human beings simply cannot be
Who talks about AI? It's me, and my brother John, and his wife Jane,
and their children, and their dog, and...
> produced in "a few hours". Building tools and transport and disposal
Let's see, I have the Earth surface covered with a 1 cm deep layer of
molecular circuitry (one can do that, though probably in a bit more
than a few hours). A human occupies a space the size of 1 cm^3, or an
orange, whatever. It takes 1 ms to copy a single human. Even assuming
we can only spread by direct contact as a wave in a 2d medium (instead
of beaming to different foci of nucleation, or physically launch the
blocks with hypersonic speed), there are quite a lot of milliseconds
in a few hours. And an average space rock made of carbonaceous
chondrite has a lot of these cubic centimeters (or oranges), and can
be fractally shredded very quickly.
> units and processing the entire solar system simply is not the work of
> "a few hours". Even if you could get all of the sentient beings
We're talking about Earth surface, not the entire solar system. The
solar system will take a little longer, especially if we consider the
material trapped in the gravitation wells, which has a kinetical
accessibility bottleneck. Unless you apply a lot of muscle, or funky
new physics.
> involved to agree, which is extremely doubtful.
Resistance is futile, you will be assimilated. Do you really think the
development will be magically held in it's track, until everybody (the
Pope, the Amish, my grandmother) agrees? <insert polite snicker here>
> [sysop stuff snipped]
>
> Your scenario assumes we all will want to go onto the chips, to live
> inside of VR space. While that looks largely attractive in many ways I
> would also expect to have the option to form external, "real-world"
> bodies and extensions to do "real-world" work and gain a different level
> of experiences. Some other beings will not wish to ever make a home in
I want to have a km of pristine real beach to me alone. Uh, I can't
afford it. You want *what*? A slowtime flesh body? You must be really
rich, and suicidal, risking losing touch with where the action is.
> VR land. If the AI respects us it will need to make some room for our
Artificial reality takes a lot of hardware to run. Because artificial
reality is more compact and efficient than real reality, and provided
no one will come and eat the hardware from under your virtual feet, it
is not obvious that you will have an interesting physical world for
your activities. Private property signs everywhere.
> choices (within reason). I am not sure how it will establish its Pax
> SysOp without doing violence to at least parts of humanity.
The sysop thing is inviable, sure.
> - samantha
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 15:30:58 MST