[ExI] Upload/Download (was: Re: Fwd: Open Individualism)

[Jason Resch]

This is a beautiful piece of writing. I appreciate the comparisons to old
voyages and fracturing of cultures due to communication delays. As well as
the real world examples of stock exchanges. I think the conclusion is right
regarding M and J brains.

I'm working on a write up regarding the ultimate physical limits of
computers which I'll soon share with this list.

Jason

On Thu, Jan 18, 2024, 1:53 PM Keith Henson <hkeithhenson at gmail.com> wrote:

> Jason wrote
> > Also, consider that if we upload ourselves to computing substrates that
> run our minds a million times faster, then the "real world" becomes
> incredibly slow.
>
> I wrote about this 12 years ago, but due to what we see at Tabby's
> Star, things might go differently.
>
> Transhumanism and the Human Expansion into Space: a Conflict with Physics
> By: Keith Henson
> Published: April 12, 2012
>
> Orbital Space Settlements
>
> There are deep memetic roots between expansion into space and
> transhumanism, largely through Eric Drexler, creator of the modern
> concepts of nanotechnology and an early activist in the post-Apollo
> flowering of the space movement. I was deeply involved in the
> post-Apollo space movement (L5 Society) and moderately involved in
> early transhumanism, having been a reviewer of Engines of Creation
> when it was being written and a participant on the early Extropian
> mailing list where such concepts as Jupiter brains, M brains, and
> computronium were first discussed. No less an authority than RU Sirius
> has referred to me as “sort of an ur-transhumanist”.
>
> I have long had misgivings about large aggregations of computing nodes
> forming a mind because of speed-of-light delays. That will reduce
> “thinking speed,” since a mind cannot “be of one mind” if much it is
> not aware of the current situation due to speed-of-light delays.
>
> There is an analogous problem within a culture. We have a world
> culture today headed toward a monoculture because electronic
> communications on fiber optics has cut the delay to getting
> information from one side of the world to the other to sub-seconds. It
> hasn’t always been this way.
>
> Ferdinand Magellan’s expedition of 1519–1522 became the first to
> circumnavigate the Earth, a project in its day not unlike the moon
> landing. My point in mentioning this is not the privations they
> suffered (extreme) or the low survival rate (232 of 270 died before
> they got back, including Ferdinand) but the sheer length of time
> (three years) they were out of touch.
>
> How much communication delay can a society tolerate before it breaks
> up into smaller units? There are historical examples; the Roman Empire
> broke up partly because their communications failed, but I am not sure
> how they apply in a post-singularity world.
>
> At the speed of light, it takes 2/15 of a second to go all around the
> planet. (40,000 km/300,000km/s) What’s to cause communication delay?
>
> The problem is uploaded humans speeding up. Human brains are
> asynchronous, but, given reaction times, we can impute an equivalent
> clock rate of ~200 Hz. Which means a human brain (or brain equivalent)
> running in moderately fast hardware could run a million times faster.
> (200 MHz is not fast hardware.)
>
> You might ask, “Why would humans do such a silly thing?” Because
> intelligence is a large factor in sexual attraction. This was probably
> established in the Stone Age. Of course, intelligence is valuable
> outside of sexual attraction, being correlated with many other
> personality and life-history traits, and is especially valued by
> transhumanists. One aspect of being smart is thinking fast, or at
> least thinking faster than the person you are trying to impress. That
> leads at once to a runaway “Red Queen” situation where, when we can
> run our thinking faster, we would rapidly push the computational speed
> to the limit, whatever it is.
>
> Speeding up will mandate uploading into faster hardware. Humans could
> think a little faster in existing bodies, but not a lot. The problem
> is that the faster you run your brain, the more the world around you
> seems to slow down. With only a modest speedup, movement would seem
> like wading through molasses. If you desire serious speedup, it
> probably has to be in a simulation of the environment to match your
> faster perception.
>
> Speeding up rapidly leads to a situation where distance causes severe
> communication delays. We hardly notice telephone communication delays
> unless they are going through satellites. Speed us up a million-fold
> and the communication round-trip delay gets to be serious. A
> million-to-one speed-up would impose a subjective round-trip delay of
> three days from one side of the earth to the other. The subjective
> round trip delay to the moon would be two months. The delay from
> hearing back from a computronium node on the far side of Earth’s orbit
> would be 2,169 years, a long time even by Ferdinand ‘s standards. The
> subjective delay talking to an interstellar spacecraft 10 light-years
> out would be 20 million years. I don’t know what the maximum is, but
> two thousand years seems a long response time for a single polity.
> Twenty million subjective years to get an answer back is just
> ridiculous.
>
> The speed-up limit may be 100 times as high.
>
> Due to this line of thinking, I no longer think it’s practical to
> surround a star with computronium. Instead, I suspect population
> centers will shrink to sizes in the few hundred-meter range and sunk
> in the deep oceans for cooling.
>
> Taking two subjective seconds as the upper limit round-trip delay for
> telephone-like communication, the distance could be up to 300,000 km
> or 300 million meters.
>
> For a million-to-one speedup, that means that all the communicating
> nodes can be no more than 300 meters apart, i.e., configured as a
> sphere 300 meters in diameter with a hole to pump water in or out (for
> cooling). The area of the sphere is ~283,000 square meters.
>
> We now need a number for how big a human-class computer might be. Eric
> Drexler gave considerable thought to this problem and came up with the
> volume of a coffee cup. For simple calculations let us take that as a
> 10-cm cube, or 100 minds to the square meter arranged one layer deep.
>
> Taking the area times Eric’s number, the population of fast-uploaded
> humans per communicating fast culture could be as high as 28 million.
> If each drew 20 kW (1,000 times the 20 W our biological brains use),
> the total power draw would be 540 GW. The other factor of a thousand
> in the million-to-one speed-up comes from the hardware being more
> efficient than biological brains.
>
> With a fair amount of pressure difference and many fine passages, a
> water flow of one liter per second through each person (10 square cm)
> would carry off 20 kW with a temperature rise of about 5° C. The deep
> ocean is definitely the place for this community.
>
> If you wanted to talk to someone without a delay of up to a second,
> one of you could move close to the physical location of the other
> party via a “core swap.” The community might have ten percent or so of
> empty brains to facilitate moving around.
>
> With each order of magnitude speed up, the maximum community size
> falls by a factor of 100. That is, a community running at only 100,000
> to one could have 2.8 billion residents and one running at 10 million
> to one would only hold 280,000. The hundred-million-to-one speedup
> habitat would only hold 2,800. Talk about a physics-enforced
> oligarchy!
>
> Would you want to move from a slum where there was only a
> 100,000-to-one speed-up to one of these “elite” places with a
> million-to-one speed-up? Do you yearn for the 100-million-to-one
> existence?
>
> This might sound like total nonsense, except we can already see the
> beginnings of serious economic concerns with the speed of light. The
> avatars that run programmed trading must be close physically to the
> computers that run the stock exchanges.
>
> “In the U.S., high-frequency firms represent only 2 percent of the
> 20,000 or so trading firms operating today. But they now account for
> nearly three-quarters of all trades.
>
> “And the average time a stock investment is held these days is 22
> seconds. If time is money, microseconds are now millions. In a recent
> so-called TED talk on cutting-edge technology, tech whiz Kevin Slavin
> wowed the audience by describing buildings now being hollowed out in
> Lower Manhattan. Why? So that high-frequency trading firms can move in
> and get as close as possible to New York’s point of entry for the
> Internet at a so-called carrier hotel in Tribeca.
>
> “. . . . this is really where the wires come right up into the city.
> And the further away you are from that, you’re a few microseconds
> behind every time. These guys down on Wall Street, they’re eight
> microseconds behind all these guys going into the empty buildings
> being hollowed out up around the carrier hotel.
> “Just to give you a sense of what microseconds are, it takes you
> 500,000 microseconds just to click a mouse. But if you’re a Wall
> Street algorithm and you’re five microseconds behind, you’re a loser.”
>
> – from Kevin Slavin on algorithms
>
> One consequence that Eric Drexler discussed in Engines of Creation
> (end of Chapter 5) was a million years of science and engineering
> being done in one year. He didn’t discuss the subjective effect of a
> whole society uploading and subjectively experiencing a million years
> per calendar year.
>
> If uploads happen by mid-century, then by the end of the century human
> culture could experience 50 million subjective years (or more).
>
> As a conclusion, if humanity takes the speed-up route, then I don’t
> see a future for M brains, S brains or even Luna-sized brains, and the
> maximum size of a communicating civilization becomes a good deal
> smaller than the Earth.
>
> Unless, of course, we can find a way around the speed of light.
>
>
> Keith
>
> On Thu, Jan 18, 2024 at 8:18 AM Jason Resch via extropy-chat
> <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
> >
> >
> >
> > On Thu, Jan 18, 2024, 6:51 AM Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat <
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
> >>
> >>
> >> Keith Henson said:
> >>  >> I suspect that people will prefer the uploaded state, but I also
> >> suspect that people will save bodies.
> >>
> >> Jason Resch said:
> >>  > Yes, I think there will still be many reasons for interfacing with
> >> the external world.
> >>
> >> That remark seems to imply you think that uploads would not interface
> >> with the external world. I don't see why they wouldn't, and I'd
> >> certainly expect they'd be able to if they wanted.
> >
> >
> > Perhaps, but then again, that might be considered too dangerous. Future
> computing substrates might be too fragile and too subtle for any human mind
> to manage in any way. And if they break something they might kill a billion
> people running on that node.
> >
> >>
> >> If nothing else, uploads should be able to maintain their own hardware.
> >
> >
> > In the near future we will be able to build hardware they maintains
> itself. Or we could envision nanobots that maintain things.
> >
> >>
> >> If you were an upload, would you want to entrust the care and
> >> maintenance of your hardware to biological beings? That will probably be
> >> the case at first, but in the long run, we don't want to depend on
> >> beings that can be disabled or destroyed so easily. It would be ironic
> >> if civilisation was wiped out by a disease, say, in spite of a good part
> >> of it being resistant to the disease!
> >
> >
> >
> > My views are inspired, among others, by this vision of the future:
> >
> > http://frombob.to/you/aconvers.html
> >
> > Also, consider that if we upload ourselves to computing substrates that
> run our minds a million times faster, then the "real world" becomes
> incredibly slow. It would take subjective weeks for each click tick of each
> second in the real world. They really does isolate the worlds. Even the
> speed of light is slowed to something like a jetliners, so sending an text
> message to the other side of the world is something that takes hours to
> arrive.
> >
> > To me this suggests the future will be not only vastly miniaturized but
> also localized. We will create many copies (for redundancy) of large
> collections of individuals (perhaps all of humanity) in localized clusters
> for speed of access and interface.
> >
> > There would be no way any human could maintain such machines, as they
> would operate on atomic or subatomic scales, and their million+ fold time
> speed difference makes the physical world a static alien thing. You could
> run around in the rain at normal speed in the real world with a robot body
> for a few minutes, but it will cost you years of subjective time, all your
> family and friends will go years without seeing or hearing from you while
> you dance in the rain. But you could have had the exact same experience in
> virtual reality running at the same speed as everyone else in the uploaded
> state.
> >
> > Jason
> > _______________________________________________
> > extropy-chat mailing list
> > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
> > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat
>
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