From: Mike Linksvayer (ml@gondwanaland.com)
Date: Sun Apr 07 2002 - 21:58:26 MDT
Robert Bradbury:
> It is going to become necessary to only install software which
> has been vetted by a "reliable" (presumably 3rd party) security
> focused organization and only accept licenses where the software
> distributor accepts liability for any damage the software might do.
Liability isn't going to protect you from a rouge emergent AI if that's
what you're worried about. Code is law.
Adrian Tymes:
> At which point, with Kazaa taking excessive CPU power (unless the AI
> part is rigged only to run in an @home style manner, which would make
> parts of the AI run while others did not, basically at random - and
> fixing it would slow it to the point of unusability), Kazaa users
> simply switch to something that doesn't tie up their box.
It's trivial to write a program that sucks up nearly all of a computer's
CPU time without the user ever noticing. Unless the user runs other
constantly CPU-bound programs, the "hidden" program will have use of
most of the CPU time even over very short periods. To the extent nodes
need to coordinate network delays will present a *much* bigger problem
than intermittent CPU usage by other programs.
Samantha Atkins:
> There are a lot of buried "ifs" in there. At dialup or even ADSL speeds
> distributed all over the country (or broader) such a beast would run so
> atrociously s-l-o-w as to be useless as far as I see. It is difficult to
> do decidely mundane computational task on such a network with adequate
> performance. Just adding more computers does not drastically increase
> the amount of useful work accomplished for all types of problems.
Who cares if it runs s-l-o-w? The big, huge mega-IF/question is what
it will take to create a self-bootstrapping AI. If you've done that
it doesn't matter whether it "thinks" 1000 times slower than humans.
If it can self-improve, you rapdily have something way beyond human
capabilities, it just responds on a different timescale. Vinge of course
thought of this possibility many years ago in "True Names".
OTOH, speed does matter. If "it" runs too slowly, it may not be stable
enough to bootstrap, or by the time it reached an interesting level it
could be overtaken by a later generation entity.
But I don't think speed (cpu or network) is the interesting issue,
software is. The path to much faster hardware is very clear. One can
quibble about the year a given level of performance will be available,
but the requisite hardware for "it" will exist in our lifetimes barring
WW#, large asteroid impact or the like. The path to requisite software
is wide open for debate.
Mike Linksvayer
http://gondwanaland.com/ml/
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