[ExI] Limiting factor to the Intelligence Singularity?

[Keith Henson]

On Sat, Dec 23, 2023 at 1:41 PM Jason Resch <jasonresch at gmail.com> wrote:

snip

> Stars only convert 0.7% of their mass to energy from fusion. Stephen hawking suggested advanced civilizations might use small black holes as power plants as they could convert 100% of their mass to energy:
>
> "A mountain-sized black hole would give off X-rays and gamma rays, at a rate of about 10 million megawatts, enough to power the world’s electricity supply."
> -- Stephen Hawking

Whatever is blocking light at Tabby's Star is intercepting 1.4 million
times the total energy the human race uses.  I suspect that back holes
may be beyond the most advanced engineering.  In any case, stars
provide a lot of energy even for smallish dyson patches.

Keith
>
> Something this small would likely be completely undetectable to us. Further, if alien civilizations shift to using reversible computers, then energy would no longer be a scarce resource to them as their computers could run without consuming power.
>
> Jason
>
>>
>> Kieth
>>
>> > I would argue these computational bounds imply a physical bound on intelligence (which is limited by, and to an extent a function of, computation and memory).
>> >
>> > Roughly speaking, computational speed is a function of mass, while memory is a function of mass and volume. The greater the volume the more memory, but the slower non-parallelizable processing becomes. Energy use is a function of forgetting (erasing information) and background temperature. A reversible computer loses no information, and therefore need use no energy at all to run.
>> >
>> > The physical object with the fastest computation and memory density would look like a black hole:
>> > https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/black-hole-computers-2007-04/
>> >
>> >
>> >> Though there is no c there, so it might not hold together entirely.
>> >> Hang with this for a second though, as there is a counter exponential
>> >> at play.
>> >>
>> >> As we grope into the future, there is a trend away from the single
>> >> brilliant inventor. Edison had a whole lab of people, some of whom
>> >> were clearly smarter than he. Eli Whitney pretty much invented the
>> >> cotton gin by himself relying on only a few simple precedent ideas. By
>> >> the time we get to super colliders, fusion reactors and rockets, you
>> >> need a village of scientists and engineers to make progress.
>> >
>> >
>> > I see echos of the memory / parallelism/ volume / speed trade-offs in physics reemerging here in the context of human brains, teams, remote work, etc. Very interesting.
>> >
>> >>
>> >> Is it possible that the exponential curve towards the singularity has
>> >> a hidden negative signal of increased resistance to progress because
>> >> of the required size of the team? Might this be one reason that we
>> >> haven't yet progressed beyond the jumbo jet airliner? Is that
>> >> indicative of the future of a lot of things? How many Intel employees
>> >> does it take to design the next iteration of their CPU? Yes, they have
>> >> computational minds that help them with layout and such now... but you
>> >> can hardly say Oppenheimer was the inventor of the atomic bomb. He was
>> >> the face of the project and coordinated the efforts to some degree,
>> >> but you can't make that level of progress without a sea of minds. Musk
>> >> has ideas (or maybe his people do that too) and finances them, but the
>> >> actual work is carried forward by an army of engineering ants. As I
>> >> believe in emergence as a deep concept, I tend to see groups more than
>> >> individuals, though I value individual contribution greatly.
>> >
>> >
>> > Progress has loosely been a function of the number of inventors which is a function of population. There was a trend change in population growth in the 60s which seemed to alter the path we were on:
>> >
>> > https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/04/22/1960-the-year-the-singularity-was-cancelled/
>> >
>> > I don't know to what extent this may have forestalled thy singularity, however, as computers have been taking on an ever greater fraction of the cognitive load. I think we're still roughly on track for van Forrester's predictions of 2027 +/- 5 years.
>> >
>> >
>> >>
>> >> Perhaps my mind has wandered too freely and it is time to go work on
>> >> my own, much simpler, inventions, as they seem to constantly be
>> >> broken.
>> >
>> >
>> > Thanks for your intriguing ideas. I appreciate them.
>> >
>> > Jason
>> > _______________________________________________
>> > extropy-chat mailing list
>> > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
>> > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat