[ExI] Breakthrough Starshot - To The Stars!

[Giulio Prisco]

My essay was republished in the IEET website:
http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/Prisco20160415

The key part with transhumanist value added is:

[The] StarChip should have the smartest possible on-board data
processing software compatible with the hardware constraints. If smart
software doesn’t fit on one StarChip, perhaps it could be implemented
in a swarm of linked and co-operating StarChips.

It appears that really smart software is on the horizon: real thinking
and feeling Artificial Intelligence (AI) of human (or more than human)
level could be developed in a few decades. Sending a real AI instead
of dumb unthinking software to Alpha Centauri would be equivalent to
sending a person (think for example of Samantha, the AI in Her).

Even more interestingly, mind uploading technology, which could
developed in this century, would permit sending human astronauts as
software entities living in the StarChip processors. I have argued
that an e-crew – a crew of human uploads implemented in solid-state
electronic circuitry – doesn’t require air, water, food, medical care,
or radiation shielding, can withstand extreme acceleration, and could
be implemented in extremely miniaturized “manned” starships.

This seems a weird idea, but – as hinted at by theoretical physicist
Avi Loeb in the announcement’s Q/A session shown in the video –
post-biological life could be common among the stars. Perhaps, as
Martin Rees and others think, advanced civilizations are
post-biological. Hawking himself argued that intelligent machines
based on mechanical and electronic components, rather than
macromolecules, could eventually replace DNA based life, just as DNA
may have replaced an earlier form of life.

Perhaps we could send AIs and uploads to the stars, combining
interstellar expansion with post-biological evolution.