[ExI] samantha vs singularity debate

Gregory Jones spike66 at att.net
Wed Sep 15 21:48:08 UTC 2010


--- On Wed, 9/15/10, ablainey at aol.com <ablainey at aol.com> wrote:

>...This could tie in with the memes thread. Mankind would need to be at a developemental state in which it would except the guidence of the AI...

On the contrary sir.  The AI is so clever it could cause any or every human to accept its direction.  Or skip the humans all together and just get online (inline?) itself after everyone has gone to bed, and program up its own embryonic or emergent self.

>... Perhaps the social catalyst was the wars?

No.  See above.

>...Do you not feel that mankind is being memetically guided toward something?

I do not.  For the past 9 yrs or so, it has felt to me more like we are memetically wandering, groping in the darkness, vaguely understanding that something fundamental is missing but knowing not what.  I am thankful for fresh and apparently young optimists like Singulariy Utopia, but I do wish to point out that overuse of the notion of infinite is riddled with paradox.



>...I do and it would appear that it has been going on for quite a long time. Some say NWO, others the reds. Why not a post singularity AI?  A


Al, the notion of an infinitely capable infinitely benevolent AI is as paradoxical as the notion of a god with the same characterists, which caused me eventually to stop believing in such a being.  I never found a way out of that paradox, and see no way out still.

I would counter-suggest a version of the Adkinsian model, whereby a future AI is really really smart and uses most or all the available matter and energy, but is not infinite.  It would be really big and really good, perhaps appearing infinite from our current point of view, but not infinite.  It would be incapable of some of our fondest desires, such as resurrecting long dead loved ones for instance.  But it could perhaps make a reasonable sim of those departed ones.

Such a being, compared to actual infinity (even aleph naught infinity) would still be zero.

spike

  




More information about the extropy-chat mailing list