X-Message-Number: 14484 Date: Sat, 16 Sep 2000 21:05:08 +1100 From: Damien Broderick <> Subject: self-extracting zipware AI 'casting Po: no paradigm-breaching magic physics await discovery, only deeper tweaks and compressions to what we already know; no wormhole or information-carrying non-local connectivity or other superluminal information transfers. If that's the universe we inhabit, what's the ultimate foreseeable transport system? I have a sense of such a process, but in my ignorance I don't know if it's anything more than wishful thinking. After brooding on this idea for a time, I came up with the subject line idea, then remembered that Rudy Rucker dealt with just this approach in his odd, idea-crammed pop sci `novel' SAUCER WISDOM (Tor, 1999). Ideally, you want to be able to reduce a mindful system to a code string and broadcast or beamcast it into space at or near lightspeed. (Only *near* c if you need to use modulated nearly-massless neutrinos, say.) This conveys you as far as possible as swiftly as possible. Trouble is, like DNA or computer code, such messages need to be decoded, instantiated and run before they have any effect (and presumably before they can be conscious and active). DNA needs a ribosome and a bunch of enzymes inside the context of a metabolizing cell. Programs needs dedicated hardware. AI or encrypted organic mind/bodies can get from here to there in one of two main ways: 1) Fire ahead a stream of, say, very fast low-mass nano von Neumann devices with redundant minimal information, able to build assemblers once they find a source of convenient construction materials and abundant energy, which deploy a receiver able to instantiate the signal that's being sent in their direction. Or 2) Develop a self-extracting signal able to interface with some plentiful natural condition - (here a miracle of insight into nature's workings occurs) - and modify that state of matter and energy into a device able to unpack the signal's main message. Rucker proposes (playfully but I assume seriously), `You have to make a signal that's self-extracting, and you have to master femtotechnology to extract out into a physical form' (p. 119). You start with a zettabyte of coded transhuman that's first squeezed by crypto to an exabyte: the same order of magnitude, interestingly, proposed by Greg Egan in several fictions. His codes are impressed onto `higher-dimensional waves... like a skater resting on a little line of a blade that carves a clean curve across the ice. The blade-line is the ordinary electromagnetic wave that you see' (pp. 115-6). Maybe we can get by without higher-dimensional waves (or branes, whatever), or maybe that's just the kind of world we're in so we use what we can get our hands on. Either way, I don't know how to make that final unzipping occur. Run the code-string into solar plasma vortices? Into a planetary van Allen belt? Into the accretion disk of a black hole? All these have been suggested in fiction as habitats for smart signal resonances. I'm wondering if anyone here can come up with better proposals. Damien Broderick Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=14484