[ExI] immortal

[Ben Zaiboc]

On 03/08/2025 18:32, Will Steinberg wrote:
> That's crazy though, there's not infinite value inside the system producible by humans.   Value on Earth mainly comes from the low-entropy energy of the sun and the resources it is used to arrange.  What does the mind-system produce to trade with the OUTSIDE?  Intellectual pursuits?  Writing?  Won't the AI be able to do that?

There's not infinite value inside the system we inhabit now. Yet we 
still manage to have an economy.

And why this emphasis on the 'OUTSIDE'? What does that mean? Do you 
think we live on 'the outside' now? We don't. We live inside a virtual 
reality created by our brains. Everything that we experience as the 
'real world' is in fact a construct generated by an array of mental 
modules run by our brains. Where is the difference between this and an 
upload? Only in the details of the implementation, and the consequences 
of that. Just as we currently operate our bodies using the parts of our 
brains dedicated to sensory and motor functions, there's no reason that 
an upload couldn't do the same, with deliberately engineered 
equivalents, instead of evolved biology. By the time we have uploading 
technology, we will certainly have much improved robotics, much closer 
to, if not better than, our current bodies than anything we can make now.

Maybe some people would prefer to disengage with the 'real world' 
altogether and live purely in a virtual space not directly connected to 
it, but the possibility will exist to operate a 'real-world' synthetic 
body, just like we operate our biological bodies now, and of course 
these bodies would be designed, not evolved, so we could make them 
whatever we wanted (and operate more than one if desired).  Think of all 
the existing jobs that could be done much better with a body designed 
for them. As well as the leisure pursuits. Bodies could be like cars, in 
that we can own more than one, hire one, etc. (not to mention maintain 
them properly, instead of 'letting nature take its course').

An upload in a privately-owned processing space connected to one or more 
synthetic bodies could do everything we do now, and lots more, and also 
take part in all the virtual worlds created by and accessible to, 
uploads everywhere (except the communist chinese ones, which presumably 
would be firewalled from the rest of humanity).

Challenges to this arising from different processing speeds would not be 
insurmountable, I'm sure.

AI will be a challenge to the existing economic paradigms of course, but 
that's something we'll all have to navigate, uploaded or not.


(Or should I have taken your comment about "yankin each others' chains 
and navel gazing" more seriously, and all the above wasn't really 
necessary to write? ��)

-- 
Ben