[ExI] The Catholic Impact (was Re: Origin of ethics and morals)

[Stefano Vaj]

On 23 December 2011 15:27, Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se> wrote:

> This, incidentally, might be a problem when AI or brain emulations appear.
> They make human capital very cheap, and might incentivize using more minds
> rather than to innovate.
>
> Of course, AI and WBE might allow scaling up innovation too, in which case
> everything is fine. But if they don't do that immediately, then we might
> see some nasty social repercussions.
>

Let me think. "If artificial minds are cheap, I will be inclined to use the
brute-force approach of putting more of them on the work rather than
finding more effective solutions"?

Well, it may be true, and they need not even be "minds". Today, we throw
relatively cheap and abundant computational resources at tasks rather than
investing in a hyper-optimisation of our programming... It reminds me in
fact of a DOS-OS/2-Windows OCR application made in Russia which resided
entirely on a single floppy disk, and required 4 Mbyte of RAM to run, as
opposed to state-of-the-art Omnipage that required 16.

Let us say, however, that the production of cheap, abundant computing
resources is in itself a field for innovation.

As to the production of cheap, abundant human workforce, the only thing we
could do is probably to establish hatcheries in a Brave New World-style
fashion. :-)

-- 
Stefano Vaj
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