From: John K Clark (jonkc@att.net)
Date: Fri Sep 01 2006 - 11:02:50 MDT
Russell Wallace Wrote:
> we've never had the ability to reliably predict what another mind, even
> one less intelligent than our own, will do.
I don't believe that is entirely true. Most of the time we have a pretty
good idea what one of our fellow creatures will do next, at least
approximately. This ability would engender a significant survival advantage
and I think it was one of the engines that drove the evolutionary arms race
that led to bigger brains. But trying to predict what someone will do who
has 3 million times as many thoughts as you do is just not going to work.
And if he is 3 million times as powerful as you are then that means a
unpredictable future. The word for that sort of thing is a singularity.
> millionfold speedups look less easy when you start considering heat
> dissipation.
Diamond, the substance a super brain would almost certainly be built is a
superb conductor of heat, and if you use reversible computing the amount of
energy needed to perform a logical operation can be made arbitrarily small.
John K Clark
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