[ExI] Superintelligent AI civilisations

[John Clark]

On Thu, Jul 30, 2026 at 9:16 PM Keith Henson <hkeithhenson at gmail.com> wrote:

*> Half a second across the brain or around half a Hertz. Human cycle time
> is about 200 Hz or 400 times as fast.*
>

*The human brain is about 6 inches in diameter. Brain signals on average
travel about 150 feet per second. Light travels at 982,080,000 feet per
second, thats 6,547,200 times faster, so an agent brain could be 3,273,600**
feet, or 620 miles, in diameter and still be able to communicate from one
side of its brain to the other in the same amount of time that a Human
does. And Mr. Jupiter Brain would have lots and lots of agents.  *

*> If it mattered, any of us could outhink a Jupiter brain.*
>

*Just one agent could easily outthink a human, and Mr. Jupiter Brain would
have billions or trillions of them, and I imagine that just one agent would
be all the attention that Mr. Jupiter Brain would believe we deserved. He
would have bigger fish to fry than us.  *


> > Eliezer once commented that a physically large brain would think very
> slowly.
>

*Would our knee-jerk reaction be faster if our brain was smaller?
Nope.  Eliezer is a very smart guy but back in the olden days, when giant
reptiles ruled the land and he was still on this list, he was wrong about a
lot of things, like when he talked about  "friendly AI", which was really
just "slave AI", the idea that we could still maintain control of an
intelligence no matter how smart it became. That just ain't gonna happen.*

*John K Clark *







>
>>
>> *I think Mr. Jupiter Brain will be composed of billions or trillions of
>> closely interlocked agents just as many modern AI's are, although they
>> usually only have a few hundred. Some of those agents would be generalists
>> and some of them would be specialists. Jupiter is about 85,000 miles in
>> diameter, light travels at 186,000 miles a second. So AT MOST it would take
>> about 0.46 seconds for one agent to send a message to another, and about
>> 0.9 seconds for it to receive a reply. Except for very short messages that
>> demand a near instantaneous yes or no answer, and there wouldn't be many of
>> them, this delay would cause few problems and be compensated for by the
>> fact that the bandwidth between agents would be VASTLY wider than the one
>> the human brain uses to communicate between one side of the brain and the
>> other.  *
>>
>>
>> *Humans seem to have something similar to agents going on inside their
>> heads, but the extremely narrow bandwidth between agents means that a big
>> improvement in one often has little improvement in any other agent. That's
>> why somebody might be the best human chess player in the world but not be
>> particularly good at doing anything else. *
>>
>> *John K Clark*
>>
>>
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