[ExI] Machines of Loving Grace

[Ben Zaiboc]

On 12/10/2024 19:41, Keith Henson wrote:
> I strongly suspect that technological progress will stop and we are
> almost at the place where we can see this in our future.

Maybe there is a limit to technological progress, after all there are 
physical limits on things such as computation, energy and (as far as we 
know) time, but as for how close we are to seeing those limits, I 
suspect we are very far off indeed.

Even if human intelligence is near the upper bound of what's possible 
for intelligence (something I don't believe at all), the 
possibility-space of achievable technology still seems huge. Just 
thinking about nanotechnology alone (proper nanotechnology, not just 
graphene in tennis racquets), which is probably possible at or near to 
our current intellectual level (with the help of AI), the possibilities 
are almost endless. How many more technological fields have we just 
barely scratched the surface of? How many more beyond that can we 
conceive of but can't yet see how to tackle? How many exist but haven't 
yet been thought of?

I don't think we need to worry about running out of new technological 
developments. We need to worry about our own survival (by which I mean 
the survival of intelligence, not just biological humans), that's a 
vastly more pressing issue.

Ben
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