[extropy-chat] Being alive timing [was: Stardust at Home]

[Robert Bradbury]

On 1/21/06, Marc Geddes <m_j_geddes at yahoo.com.au>, commenting on Spikes
comment regarding being alive wrote:
>
>
> Only for a tiny minority of rich white boys living in Europe or the
> States.


You forgot Japan, Australia, and some regions in Asia and one doesn't have
to be "rich" in the classical sense to live relatively well (compared to
those who struggle to feed themselves on a day-to-day basis).

Spare a thought for the several billion people still living on less than a
> couple of dollars a day.


A quick glance at The World Fact Book (for the World statistics) and use of
the google calculator (too bad I can't use my web browser to go to the
bathroom... yet...) reveals that the average person in the world is living
on ~$18/day.  Even assuming a long tail end of the curve for the less
developed countries I don't think it is quite as bad a picture as Marc would
paint.

Or even for most of the ordinary folks in the developed world who have to
> slog away all day at mind-numbing jobs just to stay alive.


Of course I suppose you would prefer to have us freezing in caves and going
out in the hope that we could risk our lives bringing down a wooly mammoth
and bring something home for diner...

What most people *should* ideally be doing is working
> on AGI or the theory of everything.  Unfortunately
> they can't even if they want to, due to the
> aforementioned lack of funds.  I believe that if all
> of us were awash with funds and computing power any of
> us could do what Eli does (though it would probably
> take most of us a little longer).
>
> One of the things that post-human historians should
> grasp is that the world simply was *not* awash with
> funds and computing power,  [snip]


Not today, but we are getting *very* close at least as far as computing
power goes.  The soon to be released Playstation 3 has a cell processor with
~200 GFLOPS and a graphics chip rumored to have 1.3 TFLOPS with built in
networking.  Link a few hundred of those together and you have human brain
equivalence.  And those chips are being built at the 90nm scale not the
current state-of-the art 65nm scale or the forthcoming 45nm scale.  Things
are going to get very interesting around 2010-2014 when human brain
equivalence (using a petaflop as the ballpark which is a Bradbury (~Moravec)
threshold rather than a Kurzweil threshold) starts being available in ~10
"personal" machines, then 2, then 1 machine.  And this is all without either
reversible computing (to resolve heat generation problems) and
reconfigurable hardware (so one can dedicate *all* of the petaflop to a
specific task).

While AGI will help uplift humans, a TOE probably does very little.  A point
that Marc misses is that neither of these is particularly helpful to people
*today*.  What *is* helpful is wireless (from cell phones to WiFi)
communications and low cost web enabled devices from PDAs to the low cost
laptop initiatives.  Those will give universal access to the WWW -- think of
all the young minds in less developed countries having access to everything
from Wikipedia to courses from MIT & Harvard at extremely low cost.  One
thing which is not commonly recognized is that there is are rate limits on
human development.  Two which come to mind are (a) population growth rate
and (b) human information absorption rate.  These are determined by human
physiology and will limit the rate at which the singularity "takes off".  An
additional factor would be (c) fear of the unknown.  This is probably to a
large extent physiological (genetic) as well but varies within the
population (early adapters vs. late adapters of technologies).  Until you
have a combination of human intelligence and/or AGI applied to the
development of bio/nanotech based solutions to (b) and (c) the rate of
development and economic growth (and the rate at which the problems
bothering Marc can be solved) will be constrained.

While there are many more humans living in poor situations and dying today
than there were a million, or even a hundred, years ago I think their
chances for survival and potential for growing and developing to who knows
what levels are much greater.

So I tend to lean towards Spike's perspective.

Robert
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