[ExI] Limiting factors of intelligence explosion speeds

Richard Loosemore rpwl at lightlink.com
Fri Jan 21 00:26:30 UTC 2011


Keith Henson wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 20, 2011 at 5:00 AM,  Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se> wrote:
> 
> snip
> 
>> Some factors that have been mentioned in past discussions:
>>    Economic growth rate
>>    Investment availability
>>    Gathering of empirical information (experimentation, interacting
>> with an environment)
>>    Software complexity
>>    Hardware demands vs. available hardvare
>>    Bandwidth
>>    Lightspeed lags
>>
>> Clearly many more can be suggested. But which bottlenecks are the most
>> limiting, and how can this be ascertained?
> 
> There is a historical example, almost 10 years old now, that combines
> several of these considerations.
> 
> Go to slide #13 here:
> 
> http://www.slidefinder.net/w/worms_adapted_vitaly_shmatikov_austin/24249603
> 
> An initial doubling time of 8.5 seconds was mentioned.  "Slammer" more
> or less took down the Internet in 30 minutes.
> 
> Keith
> 
> PS
> 
> The paranoid among us might want to consider the possibility that
> runaway machine intelligence has already happened.  (Ghod knows what
> goes on in unused cloud computing capacity.)  The question is how we
> might recognize it?  Would things start happen?  What?  Anything?
> Would machine intelligence stay where it was unnoticed?

Back in the day, when the telephone system was just beginning to grow, 
some people worried that THAT might wake up and become sentient.

I think you should be worried about all those telephone wires, you know.




Richard Loosemore




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