I wrote it. All animals evolve to fear the things that can kill them, which you can argue is different than fearing death because most animals have no concept of death. We can debate whether a fish on a hook or a mosquito evading a swat or an amoeba swallowing food actually feels anything or is just behaving as if it does. You could argue this about humans and AI too.
Nanotechnology won't necessarily self replicate like animals. We evolved to have sex because swapping long segments of code leads to more beneficial mutations than randomly flipping bits. But human software developers can already write 160 bits per day, vs less than 1 bit per lifetime for evolution. Economy of scale also favors specialized factories over self contained copying, but still favors replacement over repair at some point. Still, DNA based replication is pretty close to the speed and efficiency limits that Freitas calculated for nanotechnology. Moving atoms exactly where you want them takes work on the order of 10 to 100 kilojoules per gram, enough to melt or burn your work if you go too fast. But that's still a billion times less heat per atom than writing bits to RAM. Religion is unique to humans because it evolves memetically, through language rather than DNA. Religious leaders enforce rules that optimize tribal growth by promising eternal reward or punishment after death, enforced by an omnipotent but invisible being. We want to believe it because of our evolved illusions of consciousness, qualia, and free will (induced by positive reinforcement of thinking, perception, and action, respectively) that we don't want to end by dying. Religious rules regarding reproduction, such as suppression of sex for purposes other than reproduction in a two parent family, would of course not apply to robots building specialized manufacturing plants for building more robots. Moore's law is dead for transistors. But if we extend the doubling every 1.5 years of global computing capacity to nanotechnology, we should surpass DNA based life in the 2080's. Currently, the biosphere supports 10^31 DNA/RNA/amino acid copy operations per second on 10^37 bits of DNA, powered by 300 TW of photosynthesis (of which 0.8 TW is food for human consumption). The earth receives 160,000 TW at the stratosphere and 90,000 TW at the surface, and we already have achieved 20-30% efficiency in solar panels. Fossil fuels, nuclear, etc. produce only 15 TW, so should have very little impact on solar powered post DNA life. On Wed, Aug 18, 2021, 2:32 PM Nanograte Knowledge Technologies < [email protected]> wrote: > No John, I didn't write this. Correct your source. > > John stated: "On Wednesday, August 18, 2021, at 2:59 AM, Nanograte > Knowledge Technologies wrote: > That's missing the point. Evolution programmed you to fear death and then > die. We invented religion to cope. > > > Any self replicating nanotechnology would evolve the same way." > > > > ------------------------------ > *From:* John Rose <[email protected]> > *Sent:* Wednesday, 18 August 2021 11:24 > *To:* AGI <[email protected]> > *Subject:* Re: [agi] Re: Black Winter > > On Wednesday, August 18, 2021, at 2:59 AM, Nanograte Knowledge > Technologies wrote: > That's missing the point. Evolution programmed you to fear death and then > die. We invented religion to cope. > > > Any self replicating nanotechnology would evolve the same way. > > > That's an oversimplification. If you study the development of intelligence > among civilization one might say that religion is about contemporary > consciousness and communication. But we weren't referring to religion here > just "God" as an independent conceptual entity. So don't get triggered. > > From an AI's perspective "God" would be considered a representation. It > exists across numerous text corpora. Just ask GPT-3 :) > *Artificial General Intelligence List <https://agi.topicbox.com/latest>* > / AGI / see discussions <https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi> + > participants <https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/members> + > delivery options <https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/subscription> > Permalink > <https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/Tace3f9aea35af378-M74928648ee53def4026b5546> > ------------------------------------------ Artificial General Intelligence List: AGI Permalink: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/Tace3f9aea35af378-M97dddabd46450702c7c0ed6c Delivery options: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/subscription
