[ExI] Uploading cautions, "Speed Up" (Anders Sandberg)

[Keith Henson]

On Fri, Dec 23, 2011 at 10:21 PM,  Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se> wrote:

> On 2011-12-22 20:01, Keith Henson wrote:
>> On Thu, Dec 22, 2011 at 5:00 AM,  Anders Sandberg<anders at aleph.se>  wrote:
>>>> Unless making copies is illegal and strongly enforced, for example, by
>>>> AIs.
>>>
>>> But that requires a singleton (to use Nick's term), an agency that can
>>> enforce global coordination.
>>
>> Or really widespread agreement that something is a bad idea.
>
> It is enough to have one defector to ruin the agreement. The only way of
> making the low-forking strategy evolutionarily stable is to coordinate
> so that deviations are punished enough *everywhere*.

Or simply don't happen.

> And that likely
> requires a global singleton, not just an agreement among all nice
> governments or companies.

If the mechanisms for forking humans are in the control of machines
and not humans and the machines are smart enough to understand the
consequences of forking (grinding poverty) then it won't happen.  It's
hard to be sure, but there is no obvious reason for a humans to have
an evolved instinct to replicate as in forking.  Even with children,
we have decoupled drives to mate and the instinct to take care of
offspring.  But consider birth control.

Certainly physical state forking is possible and could be done at much
faster rates than the maximum human reproduction rate (days rather
than 15 years).  This is isomorphic to gray goo and is another
potential answer to the Fermi question.

Of course if the machines do unlimited forking, we are toast (more gray goo).

Forking in the uploaded state should be much faster.  I think the
fastest doubling time for a worm was 8.5 seconds.  It infected all
50,000 vulnerable computer on the 4 B internet addresses in single
digit hours and jammed the net.

I gave a lot of thought to avoiding these states in "the clinic seed."
 Left human reproduction outside of the simulation alone, but made the
simulation a more attractive place to live than outside.  Also
inhibited the machines from making food.

The result was effective and the human population outside the
simulations almost vanished.  (It might vanish entirely, but I needed
characters for the story.)

Keith