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

[Keith Henson]

I agree with John, the next few years are either the beginning or the end.

Keith

On Thu, Feb 13, 2025 at 5:28 AM John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Thu, Feb 13, 2025 at 5:40 AM Giulio Prisco <giulio at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>>> >> https://magazine.mindplex.ai/should-we-still-want-biological-space-colonists/
>>>>
>>>>  It seems very plausible to me that, very soon, we’ll see an AGI pass the full Turing Test and credibly claim consciousness
>>
>>
>>>
>>> >  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. like your article, I particularly liked the following:
>>
>>
>>> "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."
>>
>>
>>
>> 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.
>
>
>  The rest of this century? The way AI is advancing, the fact that by the end of THIS YEAR Sam Altman says the best computer programmer in the world is going to be an AI and AIs are going to start improving themselves, the world is going to be unrecognizable in 10 years, perhaps less than 5. Compared with that existential crisis, sending a man to Mars seems a bit prosaic. It's bizarre that in the recent presidential debates in the US the word "AI" is not mentioned once, it would've been more appropriate if that had been the only topic they debated on.
>
> John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis
> otb
>
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