[ExI] Superintelligent AI civilisations

[Ben Zaiboc]

On 29/07/2026 16:55, Keith Henson wrote:
>
> Light speed has always been my objection to physically large brains. They think slowly, and thinking slowly does not make sense. For evolutionary reasons, you want to think as fast as possible. If you have a lot of brains connected in a communication network, you want the network links to be as short as possible. Some of you might remember the paper I wrote on civilizations as spheres sunk in the ocean for cooling. If the thing at Tabby's star is a data center with trillions of uploaded aliens, they put up with a 2.5 second side to side delay. Which would indicate they are not running much faster then we do.


That assumes that the people on one side of the structure want to talk regularly and with low latency to the people on the other side.

I don't see that that's necessarily a good assumption.

A structure of that size would be able to support many entire civilisations, no?

If we suppose that each one occupies a volume small enough that intra-civilisational communication is fast (or at least reasonable) for brains running at a higher speed than our biological brains, then maybe slower and fewer communication between civilisations would be acceptable. Think about how often you want to talk to someone in Japan or Ceylon for instance (even though that is quite feasible), or think about the situation if we had colonised the entire solar system, with hours-long lightspeed delays between settlements scattered over a volume out to the kuiper belt, or even farther. If you lived in a habitat around Mars, you'd be talking to other people in the same habitat much much more frequently than anyone in Pluto's orbit, and would accept the long delay in comms for the few people at Pluto that you might want to talk to. You'd naturally know many more people in your local sphere than in a distant one. You might never even have any reason to talk to someone out at Sedna, so the long delay would never bother you.

Another factor that I've mentioned before is that not everything in a system needs to run at the same speed. Maybe technical, rather than social, communications could be conducted much more slowly for things like maintaining infrastructure, disseminating new discoveries, etc. You could have a steady stream of information from distant places. The fact that it's a thousand years out of date wouldn't really matter if you don't need two-way communication.

And if you really wanted to chat to the people in Civ. 47658, you could move there in the subjective blink of an eye (at the cost of the relevant number of years of missed experience).

So I agree with the first point (giant brains not being feasible), but not the second (lots of smaller brains, in a large network of some type not being able to think fast).
-- 
Ben