From: Eugene Leitl (eugene.leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen.de)
Date: Sat Nov 21 1998 - 17:09:20 MST
Anders Sandberg writes:
> Do you really think posthumans can ignore legacy systems and design
> everything from scratch whenever they need it? That sounds very
> uneconomical.
I think it would depend on how much baggage one has to lug around. If
we assume an advanced posthumanist civilization, where all available
matterenergy is turned into computational substrate (unless you have
this ultimative in anal-retentiveness dispelled by a writhing wriggle
of hosts and parasites of all scales doing their evolution dance
also in physical space -- meshes and hiearchies of fleas ad
infinitum), you are obviously bound for a virtual ecology with
enormous scope of complexity as artefacted by coevolution. You
of course have to represent skills evolved in the past which you
might need in the future. However, there is a tradeoff. The resources
needed for representation (and be it molecular tape in realspace)
cannot be timeshared for computation, and hence for evolving adequate
solutions from scratch. If the baggage becomes too large, you are
outperformed by individua who had weighted their resource allocation
differently. Of course a tabula rasa person constantly reinventing
itself is also an equal absurdity as the walking Library of Babel
locked in the loop of constant retrieval.
> > Or in other words, what makes you think that redundancy is the best way to
> > deal with the kind of flaws (if any) that exist in Jupiter brains?
>
> I am not saying it is the best way of dealing with flaws of JBs, I'm
> saying that redundancy makes a system more robust against local
> damage.
Assuming that all known systems, whether natural or men-made (I know
this is an arbitrary classification) are hierarchical, why should
virtual ecologies of giant computing clusters be different? Maybe
I'm stupid, but I don't see any plausible trajectory how one could
arrive at an even a flat-hierarchy JB starting with where we are now.
(Of course talking about post-Singularity events is meaningless, but
it's so fun...)
> > Perhaps
> > there will be redundancy, but without duplication - multiple, separate
> > algorithms.
>
> Not unlikely. Isn't this why we want to have individuals?
Another reason would seem that signalling costs to obtain some distant
copy might be prohibitive, necessity to integrate an off-shelf module
into a distinct persona (mutation) set aside. Remember Kauffman's
lettuce which we break down do common building blocks instead of
cosmically fusing with it.
ciao,
'gene
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