[ExI] singularity talk at lmco

[spike]

Cool, the singularity is so mainstream now, the weekly colloquium
advertisement uses the term Singularity thrice without ever feeling the need
to define the term.  A stodgy old company like Lockheed now is assumed to
understand what is the singularity.  

 

I had an idea for bringing about the singularity.  We think of it as a
program which (somehow) develops human intelligence and motives, but we as a
species have demonstrated we have no clue how to create that software.
Suppose we theorize that a singularity could arise from a gigabyte program
(assuming away comments and any embedded documentation, spaces, visual
breaks etc) so that's 10^9 bytes or 10^12 bits.  We start with 10^12 bits,
set them all to zero, run that, if no singularity, set the first bit to 1,
run that, no singularity, second bit to 1 first to 0, and so on.  Keep
incrementing thru all 10^2 bits and hope that the first (in numerical order)
intelligent program is friendly.  Then if no singularity occurs, we know
that no gigabyte program can become intelligent and end humanity and all
life as we know it.  

 

We could distribute the task (and would need to) since there would be 2^2^12
possible different gigabyte programs, which is a lot, and we also need to
deal with all the vile pornographic images and political commentary from the
other end of the spectrum and such things that would be generated, all
smaller than a gigabyte.

 

On the other hand there is no reason to think there is only one intelligent
program.  If a program is perfectly optimized for minimum variable name
lengths with no comments and such, there is very little chance that it takes
exactly a gigabyte.  There are probably a few bits left over, and in most
programming languages spaces can be inserted for ease of reading without
changing anything, so if you have a gigabyte program which is intelligent we
could insert a space in perhaps a billion different places and the thing
would still be self-aware and if so there are a billion different
configurations which could end us all.  Or not.

 

spike

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