[extropy-chat] Is Telepathy a safer route?

[Samantha Atkins]

On May 23, 2006, at 10:44 AM, A B wrote:

> I'm talking way, way, way out of my league here, but I'll give it a  
> shot anyway. Would a safer approach to super-intelligence be  
> through human to human telepathy - mediated by electronics (using  
> essentially unenhanced humans, spare the telepathy machinery)?  If  
> some sort of non-intrusive scanning or sensing machine ( a really  
> souped up fMRI ?) could produce a useful information stream to  
> another implanted human, or a group of implanted humans, could the  
> collective processing power be another (possibly safer) route to  
> super-intelligence? Perhaps there could be some sort of filtering  
> device where say 100 "connected" humans would cooperatively process  
> a specified problem using their parietal lobes, while another 100  
> "connected" humans were cooperatively processing the same problem  
> using the prefrontal cortex, and so on.
>

It is not at all clear this would work as described to obtain super- 
intelligence.  Our communication networks today link human minds  
together much more tightly than at any earlier time in history.   
While this has led to an explosion of knowledge it is not clear that  
humans thus connected actually are more intelligent individually or  
as a group.  If the connection was somehow more direct between the  
relevant conceptual and analytical parts of the human brains involved  
then perhaps there would be more of a real increase in intelligence.   
But the resulting mind melded group would be something rather different.

Now a lot of improved effective intelligence could come from being  
able to know, more or less, what others were thinking in the group  
relevant to a problem at a deeper, clearer and more immediate level  
than through the medium of words.   The communication could  
potentially be much faster and richer.   This could indeed lead to  
greater effective intelligence in working groups.   There is also a  
potential for greater empathy and understanding of one another that  
is somewhat promising.   There are also possible downsides.

I would think some form of brain augments a la Accelerando would be  
needed for a group to effectively share a larger conceptual space.   
As human brains seem to be fairly limited in the number of things  
that can be simultaneously consciously attended to ( 7 +- 2) it is  
not at all clear than simply wiring together a bunch of such minds  
would produce that much improvement.  I think the brains involved  
would require augmentation to overcome that limitation in order to  
reason much more effectively as a group than any other humans or less  
directly connected groups of humans.

>
> A collective "meat-machine" super-intelligence would consist of  
> many distinct minds, values, and interests. It's collective "circle  
> of empathy" (Jaron Lanier) would likely be huge. No single  
> individual from within the collective would be significantly more  
> intelligent than any other member, and so no specific "world view"  
> would dominate any others. And psychopaths could presumably be  
> screened from the group. It would be kind of like a meaty version  
> of Mr. Yudkowsky's "CEV".

I do not think so.  The result would not think that much better or  
differently or necessarily be more intelligent.  It would more or  
less largely do what humans do without such deep interlinking but  
faster and with less communicational friction.   But that is not  
enough to actually be wiser and smarter as in a "CEV".

- samantha