From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Sun May 06 2001 - 02:03:28 MDT
> Yes. But this immediately brings up the question of whether the
> singularity has a general S or sigmoid shape or not. If there is
> an upper level of progress, (i.e. computation density, speed-up
> factor, and so on), then your observation is exactly right.
>
> But if there is no upper limit---which many of the people who have
> been thinking more about the singularity than I have appear to
> believe---then it's not clear that any information from these
> remote sources would be of any interest whatsoever (except perhaps
> to satisfy historical antiquarian instincts). In other words, to
> the extent that the "singlularity" indeed is a true singularity,
> then data from elsewhere becomes redundant as well as boring.
Just because they have thought a lot about it doesn't make it the least
bit plausible. The fundamental limitations on information storage due to
Heisenberg/Bekenstein, thermodynamics (energy costs of irreversible
operations), lightspeed etc appear to form a very plausible barrier
limiting how much computation you can get. Claiming that a sufficiently
advanced intelligence can circumvent them is handwaving.
Besides, if lightspeed is a limit but you can get infinite computation
locally, then you get something like the Jeans collapse of a gas cloud:
intelligences shrink more and more, but then separate into ever smaller
disjoint regions that shrink into new regions. The result is an infinity
of hyposcale omegas.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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