On Fri, May 20, 2022 at 2:48 AM Tomasz Rola <rto...@ceti.pl> wrote: *> I think I can easily wait five more years and see if it all boils down > to the mix of hype, half hype and enthusiastic lies...*
In five years people will be saying what people have always been saying about AI, yes the progress made five years ago was real but there will be no further progress in the next five years, in fact there will be no further progress in AI *EVER*; and then they'll get all misty eyed and start talking about some secret sauce that only biological life in general and humans in particular have. *> I really wonder, what makes you think this Universe is not engineered? > How would one test it for signs of "engineeredness"?* If the universe was engineered then when we look at the Andromeda galaxy we shouldn't see light and other high-quality photons radiating uselessly into infinite space, we should only see low energy infrared and radio waves because even civilizations that prefer to live in a virtual world would need power to run their computers. And if even one individual in one civilization in the Andromeda galaxy decided to make a Von Neumann probe that's exactly how their galaxy would look to us, except that we wouldn't be here to look at it because one of their probes would've arrived at our galaxy by now. All you need is one probe, and once Drexler style Nanotechnology has been developed, which I remind you would require no scientific breakthroughs just better engineering, everything could be divided into jist 2 classes, things that are easy and cheap to make, and things that are impossible to make because they violate the fundamental laws of physics. Nothing would be possible but expensive and hard to make. That's why I think we must be the only intelligent species in the observable universe, it is after all a finite space so somebody has to be first. Some may argue for other explanations for the Fermi paradox, such as civilizations destroying themselves in a nuclear war, but I don't think that's a viable answer. Humans developed nuclear weapons about five years before they discovered the transistor but that may be unusual, it only happened because the USA was under enormous pressure and it was the only country in the world that had the industrial capacity to develop nuclear bombs in a remarkably short time. And if there are thousands or millions of civilizations in our galaxy as some claim then there must be some that developed on planets similar to Earth except that it had very little of the element Uranium in the planet's crust; that lack would not hinder the development of life since Uranium plays no part in biology, but it would mean that nuclear weapons would be impossible to make until their technology (not their science) had advanced enough to make asteroid mining practical, and by that point they'd almost certainly have the ability to make Von Neumann machines. Hell, I think humans will almost certainly have the capability to make Von Neumann probes in less than 100 years, probably less than 50, maybe much less. John K Clark See what's on my new list at Extropolis <https://groups.google.com/g/extropolis> edn -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CAJPayv3JMKAxUN185Y_%3D7Gc6EV9kUVcW3pFQAvNbyTo%3DnFFBFw%40mail.gmail.com.
