[ExI] [Extropolis] Should we still want biological space colonists?

[Giulio Prisco]

On Fri, Feb 7, 2025 at 7:02 PM John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> wrote:
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> On Fri, Feb 7, 2025 at 3:25 AM Giulio Prisco <giulio at gmail.com> wrote:
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>> >> This is my latest article on Mindplex magazine. Should we still want
>> biological space colonists? I think the question is important, and the
>> answer is not obvious.
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>> https://magazine.mindplex.ai/should-we-still-want-biological-space-colonists/
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>>  > It seems very plausible to me that, very soon, we’ll see an AGI pass the full Turing Test and credibly claim consciousness
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>  We're well past that point, two years ago a computer could pass the Turing test, these days if a computer wanted to fool somebody into thinking it was a human being it would have to pretend to know less than it does and think slower than it can.
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> I like your article, I particularly liked the following:
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> "I’m proud of having played my little part as a human being (release 1.0) of the 20th and 21st century, and we all should be collectively proud of giving birth to our mind children. The universe belongs to them. On a less gloomy note, I’m persuaded that humans and machines will merge and co-evolve, eventually becoming one and the same thing. So we will be our mind children, and they will be us. Based on all the considerations above, wasting time and resources with biological space colonists doesn’t seem to make sense. Let’s save all that money we spend on crewed space programs. Let’s build conscious HL-AGI robots first – the first generation of our mind children – and send them to colonize the planets and the stars. We’ll be there through them."
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Thank you John, this is one of my two central points indeed. But the
other is that, in the short term (say, for the rest of this century),
we should still want human colonists in the solar system, because this
will be good for our mental hygiene and spirit.

> John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis
> ewb
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