From: Eugen Leitl (eugen@leitl.org)
Date: Sat Jun 08 2002 - 15:06:40 MDT
On Sat, 8 Jun 2002, Samantha Atkins wrote:
> Wonderful. You are speaking about letting loose free replicators to
> overrun all real-estate within reach. By what conceivable right or
> justification would a sentient species ever do such a thing?
This has happened down here ~10^9 years ago. You never noticed?
We have never been in control since. Barring successful installment of a
singleton (fat chance), we'll never will. Populations of noise-driven
agents exploring behaviour space are fundamentally unpredictable and
uncontainable. (And some of us even like it that way, dammit).
The larger the population size (lots of atoms in this local system to make
a Truly Mindbogglingly Large Oh My God It's Full of Stars! population, at
least by today's standards) and the longer you wait, the less the
probability of a successful containment. Remember, a single escapee will
do.
As soon as there are pioneers having successfully escaped the containment
(ensign, fire at will), they are subject to selection pressure for rapid
travel and short replication times. Over a short sequence of iteration
steps, all the earmarks of originating culture are erased. Pioneer is a
sharply defined ecological niche, and is subject to very palpable
convergent evolution pressure.
> We are what we are, sentient and hopefully responsible beings.
Hey, speak for yourself!
> If we create and loose such a thing then we are responsible for
> it. What they are is of our own design and invention. We
"Um. Sorry?" (Okay, not really).
> cannot duck choice by ignoring what we are and what we decide to
> do via calling it "anthromorphising".
You'll notice that I only use natural selection and probabilistic
arguments. Whereas you mention those nebulous and noble things like
responsiblity, and choice. A self-replicating probe (one of trillions) for
Kuiper mining with a bug in navigation module doesn't know much about
those.
> If we build these "not even sentient processes" then human
> values very much are at work in deciding if this is a reasonable
> and sane thing to do. If we claim that they are not then we run
Economic pressures. (A special case of evolutionary turf). What was that
sane and reasonable thing again?
> the danger of saying "the technology made us do it" or "the
> technology got away from us and did this." I don't think either
> one of these is very valid or mature. Do you?
You're completely missing the point. Valid doesn't mean a thing in the
face of a fait accompli ("We've got signatures of *HOW MANY* runaway
probes *WHERE*?"). Mature assumes everybody is, all of the time, including
dumb machinery triggering a firmware bug, resulting in unanticipated side
effects about a lightday away as the astrochicken flies.
I'm sorry, but your mind is far too orderly. It makes you blind for a
whole range of possibilities, not all of them pretty.
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