X-Message-Number: 5533
Date: Tue, 2 Jan 1996 21:08:12 -0800
From: John K Clark <>
Subject: SCI.CRYONICS Drexler's Timeline

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In  #5521  Peter Merel <>  On Tue, 2 Jan 1996 Wrote:


                >What suggests that your simulated creatures will ever evolve
                
                >intelligence (human intelligence or better)? Life existed on
                                >Earth for many billions of years before humans evolved   

If things don't work out after 570 million years let it evolve for another 
billion or two, the simulation would be working so fast you could easily 
afford to. Besides, I think we could improve the very process of evolution.  
It's a pity nature never thought of how acquired characteristics could be 
inherited, it would sure save a lot of time. The two parts of Darwinian
Evolution, random mutation and deterministic natural selection, work but its 
horribly slow, it took 5 billion years ( give or take a few billion) to 
produce us. Fortunately we found a better way, thinking. Memes evolve mostly 
by Lamarckian not Darwinian methods, and that's why Social Evolution is about 
100 million times faster than physical evolution, and its accelerating. 
I don't see why Lamarckian evolution couldn't, in principle, be used to 
evolve things other than memes. 


                >It seems to me that the best way to engineer super 
                >human-like intelligence has already been plotted by Moravec 
                >- begin with regular humans  and improve their hardware. 


We could combine the two approaches. You could have critters that start off 
as smart as you and me ( but much faster ) as soon as nanotechnology  is 
developed. In fact, the critters could be you or me.                     

If you have nanotechnology besides having the ability of moving atoms around 
you also can detect the position of atoms in an existing object. As long as 
you had access to the object, all you'd need is a good look at it and you 
could duplicate it, or simulate it, you don't need to know how it works.

To simulate a brain I'd need to have some understanding about how neurons 
operate, but I wouldn't need a high level understanding of the brain as a 
whole. I can just blindly copy from nature, neuron number  89,027,481,662 
connects to neuron  number 23,442,818,921  using synapse  number 7342 at a 
strength of 61247. Yes, it's paint by numbers, but the point is the picture 
gets painted even if I don't know how to paint. After all, a chip designer 

may have no idea how a program running on his chip operates.



                >the intelligence that evolves may have no interest in
                                >donating its design skills to human ends                    
                
A valid concern, but that's true regardless of how AI's are made, and at any 
rate will not prevent the Singularity from happening, it would just make it 
incompatible with human desires. A super intelligent AI would certainly have  
its own agenda, whether we would play even a small part in it I do not know, 
it's just one of many dangers associated with the singularity.
                             


                >They'd [ ET's ] probably be as interested in communicating
                
                >with us as we are with lichen - that explains the
                                >Fermi paradox.               

If they are indifferent to us then they wouldn't bother hiding from us.  
I think if a race or hyper intelligent cosmic ET's existed, it would be the  
single most obvious fact about the universe, but at least in this universe,  
I just don't see it. 

Or maybe somebody else has already tried the AI evolution experiment, maybe  
we're somebody else's half finished simulation running on a nano computer. 



                >As to engineering the universe, what makes you think it
                                >doesn't suit Them as it is?

A race of ET's that thought everything was just peachy exactly the way it is 
now wouldn't be super intelligent, because they wouldn't have the need or 
even the desire to improve themselves. Actually they wouldn't feel the need 
to do much of anything. If everything is perfect and all your goals have been 
fulfilled then brain power is a useless commodity. 

Human beings are certainly not content, they much prefer an engineered 
environment. People may go camping on the weekend, with a few thousand 
dollars worth of Hi Tech equipment, but they always come back to the city 
on Monday.


                                         John K Clark         

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