On 30-01-2022 14:29, John Clark wrote:
On Sun, Jan 30, 2022 at 6:15 AM Lawrence Crowell
<goldenfieldquaterni...@gmail.com> wrote:
_> Whether we develop an AI that surpasses us and continues is
rather speculative._
I don't think it's speculative at all, in fact I think it's
inevitable. The entire human genome only contains 750 Megabytes, the
baby Albert Einstein didn't have any more than that but in the next
few decades he received additional information from the environment,
enough to enable him to figure out General Relativity. The minimum
amount of information a seed AI that contains a similar learning
algorithm needs must be far less than 750 Megabytes because the human
genome contains an enormous amount of redundancy and has information
about a lot of other organs not just the brain. By way of comparison
the new Apple Mac operating system is about 20 times larger than
Albert Einstein's genome.
_I have neither opinion about that particularly, though I think
there is a general Pinocchio__ problem with this. _
I admit that humans may never be able to fully understand how an AI
could be made, but that doesn't mean an AI could never be built.
Researchers Build AI That Builds AI [1]
_I am not sure there are many biologically complex and active
planets in any galaxy. Given we occurred in 10^{-5} of Earth's
duration I suspect intelligent life is rare. _
I agree because an intelligent civilization could send a Von Neumann
probe to every star in the galaxy in less than 50 million years even
if we make the ridiculously conservative assumption that their
spacecraft could move no faster than ours can. And we would have
certainly notice that if they had.
_> The nearest ETI on our past light cone could be 10s of millions
of light years away._
I think we could be the only intelligent species in the observable
universe, but if not and we ever did find a signal from a civilization
at roughly our technological level that would be very bad news because
it would mean civilizations always run into an existential catastrophe
of some sort when they reach about our level of development.
John K Clark See what's on my new list at Extropolis [2]
The problems we have with limiting our CO2 emissions suggests that we
will be wiped out sooner or later as a result of processes that power
the economy. The more progress we make with AI systems, robots that
eliminate human work, the more growth potential the economy will get. At
some point we'll have fully self-maintaining and self-replicating
factories. Such systems don't need to be very intelligent, just like
most biological self-replicating machines aren't very intelligent
either. Also, this development is then driven by economic growth, not by
de desire of some people to get to very intelligent AI systems.
But once you have an economy that is sun by autonomous, relatively dumb
machines that maintain and build each other, it's only a matter of time
before this machine version of biology will end up destroying the
original biology. At some point a mutation will arise that causes some
machines to produce poisonous substances but which also improves these
machines. The production of poisonous and even radioactive compounds
that don't harm the machines, will steadily grow over time. This will
cause a mass extinction. It's then quite analogous to the great
oxygenation event:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event
The original creators of the machine economy will be powerless to stop
this, because everything depends on everything else in this machine
ecology. They would have to eradicate the entire system, which is far
harder than it is for us to simply stop dumping CO2 into the atmosphere.
They would have become so dependent on the machine economy that they
wouldn't be able to survive without it. So, it can also be compared to
cancer that has spread and has become incurable: Eradicating the cancer
will also kill the patient.
The James Webb Telescope may end up finding habitable planets via
biosignatures of complex organic molecules in the atmosphere, but it may
also find evidence of strange planets where the atmosphere contains
significant amounts of poisonous compounds for which a natural
explanation is unknown. There may be planets where a machine ecology
exists that produces lots of tritium. This can be detected, if you
replace hydrogen by tritium in some compound then that affects the
moment of inertia of the molecule and thereby the rotational energy
levels. Curiously, these planets will typically be Earthlike planets in
the habitable zone.
Saibal
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