From: Thomas Buckner (tcbevolver@yahoo.com)
Date: Fri Jun 25 2004 - 23:08:17 MDT
--- Simon Gordon <sim_dizzy@yahoo.com> wrote:
> >The universe is more interesting with us in it.
>
> LOL. Really? Well you could be right, but given that
> at some point the superAI would be capable of bringing
> into existence any number of an infinite variety of
> "designer intelligences", i tend to think that we
> would only really be interesting from a historical
> perspective...and is history all that interesting?
> Maybe to some humans it is but i doubt whether higher
> intelligences would be at all bothered about anything
> like that.
Yes, really. I think you deem that the superAI will be "vast, cool, and unsympathetic" to the
degree that ve has no concept of how humorous our follies and farces are. Even our stupidity is
interesting. Strange, but true. And yes, I think even resurrecting the dead by recreating all
possible iterations of intelligence (including ourselves) is reasonable if the processing capacity
is available. To do otherwise is (to me) a bit like reproducing half the Mandelbrot set while
deciding that the other half is somehow inferior. I myself have strongly come to suspect that
human qualia are not intrinsically better than, say, bonobo qualia on a good day, or dolphin
qualia. Why would a superior intelligence deny itself access to other modes if ve had the choice?
I assert that this falls into the class of things people think a SAI might do that in fact ve
would not do, because ve would know better. There might be useful learnings or experiences ve
could derive from 'seeing through our eyes', so that if ve got rid of us before the resource was
exhausted, ve would be doing something dumb.
I once mentioned to a woman acquaintance a bit of data that I gleaned from an article in Esquire
(a men's magazine). She replied, "I don't read men's magazines." I told her that this was
unenlightened because I have a rule: Never limit your sources of information.
Now, if I am smart enough to understand that, so is any SAI worth ver salt. Ve might run out of
uses for us eventually, but we can't predict if or when, and initially, neither can the SAI. Don't
sell us short the way we sell other life short, and don't sell SAI short the way you sell us
short. We are able to destroy other life and intelligence because we are smarter, but we do it
because we are not smart enough.
Tom Buckner
=====
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail - 50x more storage than other providers!
http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jul 17 2013 - 04:00:47 MDT