[ExI] ai is the easy road

[Keith Henson]

On Mon, Oct 12, 2026 at 7:37 AM Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

snip

Maybe, but it seems very inefficient. Breeding is slow enough to us
> biological beings. Imagine how much slower it would be for creatures that
> think a million times faster.
>
> A much better path would be to impose certain conditions on the ability to
> upload. I'm slowly working that out in a work of fiction, which, if I ever
> finish it, will be available on teh interwebs without any restrictions.


I wrote a series of connected short stories 20 years ago where I explored
the consequences of uploading (near extinction). If you want to borrow that
would and even characters for a story, be my guest. Whether you do or
don't, I would really like to see what your take on the world of uploading.

When the astronomers discovered Tabby's star, I analyzed it as a possible
alien data center out in the "computational zone" where low temperatures
kept down computer errprs. The object causing the dip has an area of
hundreds of times the area of the Earth and would support an uploaded
population in the trillions. Alas, it seems to have a natural explanation.

Keith

>
> > >...Or they could kill us all, but that seems unlikely to me. There
> would be no point to it...
> > --
> > Ben
> > _____________________________________________
> >
> >
> > The point would be to have all the available electric energy for its own
> needs.  If they kill the humans who use electric power, they could keep the
> rest, the sub Saharan Africans, the Australian aborigines, the Amish for
> instance.  Then AI gets all of the available power resources.
>
>
> That strikes me as utterly implausible.
>
> Even we puny humans can think of ways of obtaining energy that vastly
> exceeds what we are generating now. It's political and economic
> considerations that constrain it, not physics. I'm confident that
> superintelligent AI will be able to think of ways of generating electricity
> that dwarf our current efforts. Not to mention the possibility that they
> might be able to transcend the need for any electricity at all.
>
> Removing those constraints would make a much bigger impact than removing
> the humans.
>
> Removing the human's ability to keep imposing those constraints would be
> the key, not removing the humans themselves.
> --
> Ben
> "The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who
> watch them without doing anything." - Pablo Casals, via Albert Einstein
>
> _______________________________________________
> extropy-chat mailing list
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20261012/38137ec9/attachment.htm>