<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
</head>
<body>
On 08/02/2025 22:06, Adrian Tymes wrote:<br>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:mailman.74.1739052385.412.extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org">
<pre><blockquote class="gmail_quote"
style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div
dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_quote"><div>And much of defense can be automated (e.g. like the CIWS that automatically
detect and fire upon incoming threats which today's ships already use).
</div></div></div></blockquote><div>
</div><div>True.
I am assuming automated but nonsentient (because otherwise that would
be putting a mind outside) defenses and maintenance. The attackers
might see it as an abandoned relic; the fact that it has active
machinery means nothing in an age where active machinery has long since
been everywhere. (Today is still not quite that age: any machinery
that's still running, was almost certainly built recently enough that
someone involved - in construction and/or maintenance - is still alive.)</div></pre>
</blockquote>
<br>
This is assuming only two options are available - fully sapient
minds and simple automatic mechanisms. I don't think that's
realistic. Intelligent but non-sapient systems are easy to create
(we do it already), and a multi-layered system of monitoring and
defence should be possible that would solve all these problems.
There are lots of possibilities for different combinations of
different processing speeds, levels of intelligence, awareness, and
sapience that should allow a number of different strategies for
keeping a community of uploads safe, with multiple redundancy.
Imagine a set of, say, dog-level intelligences keeping guard against
external aggressors, bright enough to know when they can take care
of a problem themselves, and when to refer the problem further in,
to a more intelligent system.<br>
<br>
I don't see that 'abandoning all sensing of and interaction with the
outside environment', <i>for the system as a whole</i>, would ever
be realistic at all. It wouldn't be necessary or desirable.<br>
<br>
I'm thinking of the upload community as being like a brain, with the
actual uploads representing the parts of the frontal cortex that
enable us to daydream, plan, and perform other highly abstract
functions. The rest of the brain is concerned with things like
keeping the body alive, running the sensory and motor systems, etc.<br>
<br>
An upload community could be like a person who does things and talks
to people, just like anyone else, but whose imagination is galloping
along a million times faster than outside events, oblivious to them,
until alerted to a potential 'outside' problem by the peripheral
nervous system and limbic brain. The problem could then be solved at
a million-fold speed, then the implementation handed over to the
real-time parts to execute. Some problems don't even need that, and
can be dealt with by spinal reflexes, for instance. Or guard-dogs.<br>
<br>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
Ben</pre>
</body>
</html>