I don't know if I will live long enough to see the Singularity, but the more I think about it, the more I believe it is irrelevant. Once AGI can start improving itself, I think it will quickly advance beyond human intellect as humans are advanced over bacteria.
If you were a bacteria, how would the existence of human life affect you? It sounds like a silly question, but what if the Singularity has already happened? How would you know? What would it be like for your intellect to be embedded as a speck in an enormous superhuman intelligence? It seems to me that in order for you to retain some sense of identity, a superhuman intelligence would have to run a simulation of your familiar universe. What is disturbing, is that you would have no way to know. The universe you experience now could already be simulated. How could you prove that it isn't. In fact, Hutter's AIXI model and the existence of Occam's Razor suggests that the universe is in fact a computation. The original question was about life extension as motivation for AGI. Humans, like other animals, are programmed through evolution to fear death and to believe in free will and self awareness, what we call "consciousness". If you were to build an autonomous robot, you would probably program it the same way to maximize its chances of survival. What you call "free will" is actually an algorithm that seeks to maximize an accumulated reward signal that you don't directly control. You don't eat because you choose to. You eat because you are programmed to behave as if you choose to. A higher intelligence need not be programmed to fear death or to believe in its own consciousness. What happens when you become a part of this intelligence, when your memories are added to it? Presumably that is what would happen if you use AGI for life extension, to upload the information in your brain into a much more powerful computer. If we regard the brain as a computer, then death is the loss of all memories learned during your lifetime. But if the universe is simulated, then that information is not lost because the simulation could always be repeated. If you assume the universe is real, then what is the value of the information in your brain? If all your memories were erased and replaced with those of a different person, would you be more or less alive? I believe the universe is simulated. I don't know why the simulation exists. Maybe there is an AGI working on some problem whose purpose we cannot understand. Maybe it is just experimenting with different universes for fun. Maybe there is no reason at all; the current universe is just one of an enumeration of all Turing machines. -- Matt Mahoney, [EMAIL PROTECTED] ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=11983
