[ExI] Von Neumann probes for what?

Tomasz Rola rtomek at ceti.pl
Sat Jan 1 18:24:57 UTC 2011


On Sat, 1 Jan 2011, BillK wrote:

> if you like, forget about orbiting around black holes. My proposal
> that a post-singularity intelligence will have a million times speedup
> in processing still has the result that sending probes out in effect
> means that they will live through eons while the probes hardly
> physically move at all. That is sufficient for the argument.

Well, if boredom is their problem - they can go into suspend-to-ram or 
suspend-to-disk mode :-).

Or they can learn to meditate. I wonder how they would achieve this, on a 
substrate million zillion gazillions times faster than a human, etc etc.

When I had to make my way through a very boring lecture, I used to 
meditate a lot. Time passed like glass thrown against the wall. To my 
fellows who were not inclined towards spiritual enhancements, those hours 
must have been a torture however. Believe it or not, but forty five 
minutes of lecture is only about hundred and eighty breaths. Maybe two 
hundreds, maybe a hundred and fifty. On a good day, a hundred. Something 
like this.

Morale: boredom is not a problem - it can be either avoided or killed.

No, reading was not an option. I tried it but the lecturer was too 
distracting.

BTW is there anything forcing them to use relativistic physics? Like, the 
fact that we don't know it, doesn't mean they do not know either. Ugh, 
triple negation, is it still English that I use?

> (Though it appears that white holes don't exist. They seem to be a
> theoretical result that nobody has spotted in reality).

Sure. But there is so much discussion here about things purely ethernal 
;-) that adding one or two does not make any difference at all. I doubt 
anybody but you noticed it ;-).

Actually, talking about non-existent subjects, like benevolent AIs (and 
what they could do as leisure activity once they no longer enjoy killing 
humans), seems to be the only and sufficient reason for this list to exist 
and for me to subscribe :-).

> Agree completely. We are like ants speculating on the motivations of a
> being that stomped on one ants nest and left another untouched.

Terrific perspective. But we are quite well equipped to discuss and 
understand other ants, which are our biggest concern, or should be. The 
bigger beings are indifferent and can be likened to supernovae. We can't 
stop it. We could have built planetary shield if enough decision makers 
had a clue - or go Swiss way (shelters for every citizen).

Regards
Tomasz Rola

--
** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature.      **
** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home    **
** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened...      **
**                                                                 **
** Tomasz Rola          mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com             **



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