[ExI] Should we still want biological space colonists?

[Ben Zaiboc]

On 08/02/2025 22:06, Adrian Tymes wrote:
>
>     And much of defense can be automated (e.g. like the CIWS that
>     automatically detect and fire upon incoming threats which today's
>     ships already use). 
>
> True. I am assuming automated but nonsentient (because otherwise that 
> would be putting a mind outside) defenses and maintenance.  The 
> attackers might see it as an abandoned relic; the fact that it has 
> active machinery means nothing in an age where active machinery has 
> long since been everywhere.  (Today is still not quite that age: any 
> machinery that's still running, was almost certainly built recently 
> enough that someone involved - in construction and/or maintenance - is 
> still alive.)

This is assuming only two options are available - fully sapient minds 
and simple automatic mechanisms. I don't think that's realistic. 
Intelligent but non-sapient systems are easy to create (we do it 
already), and a multi-layered system of monitoring and defence should be 
possible that would solve all these problems. There are lots of 
possibilities for different combinations of different processing speeds, 
levels of intelligence, awareness, and sapience that should allow a 
number of different strategies for keeping a community of uploads safe, 
with multiple redundancy. Imagine a set of, say, dog-level intelligences 
keeping guard against external aggressors, bright enough to know when 
they can take care of a problem themselves, and when to refer the 
problem further in, to a more intelligent system.

I don't see that 'abandoning all sensing of and interaction with the 
outside environment', /for the system as a whole/, would ever be 
realistic at all. It wouldn't be necessary or desirable.

I'm thinking of the upload community as being like a brain, with the 
actual uploads representing the parts of the frontal cortex that enable 
us to daydream, plan, and perform other highly abstract functions. The 
rest of the brain is concerned with things like keeping the body alive, 
running the sensory and motor systems, etc.

An upload community could be like a person who does things and talks to 
people, just like anyone else, but whose imagination is galloping along 
a million times faster than outside events, oblivious to them, until 
alerted to a potential 'outside' problem by the peripheral nervous 
system and limbic brain. The problem could then be solved at a 
million-fold speed, then the implementation handed over to the real-time 
parts to execute. Some problems don't even need that, and can be dealt 
with by spinal reflexes, for instance. Or guard-dogs.

-- 
Ben
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