[extropy-chat] How to be copied into the future?.

[John K Clark]

"Damien Broderick" <thespike at satx.rr.com>

Me:
>> Why does randomness and stupidity beat
>> intelligence?

You:
> In the general sense, because they had 4 billion years

It took 4 billion years because random mutation and natural selection is
incredibly STUPID! Intelligence is not stupid, that's why it's called
intelligence. There is an entire galaxy of solutions unavailable to
evolution, but not to intelligence. Every large change evolution makes
consists of lots of small changes, and every single one of those small
changes must confer an IMMEDIATE advantage to the organism; evolution just
doesn't understand the concept of one step backward two steps forward.
Imagine if you had to turn a prop airplane engine into a jet with a million
tiny changes and ever change must improve the performance of the engine, and
you had to make the changes while the engine was running. It just couldn't
be done. That's probably why evolution was never able to come up with some
apparently simple things, like a macroscopic body part that could move in
360 degrees.

And also consider the fact that the fastest signals in the brain move at
about 100 meters a second, most are far slower; the signals in a AI would
move at 300,000,000 meters a second and would have a far shorter distance to
travel.

> I thought the claim was that a perfect copy could be contrived and swapped
> in instantaneously. Nano couldn't do that.

That is true, I used the word "instantaneously" because I thought it would
make a cleaner thought experiment, but if I had said "after 5 minutes" would
it really make a cosmic difference?

  John K Clark