I am thinking for CO2 and methane, you are not giving renewables a chance, and the possibility of CO2 and methane extraction from the atmosphere a fair try, as yet. The greens worldwide are keen on attacking the FF vendors, and low key on providing alternatives first. Most seem to be from areas outside of technology and seem foolish because they are determined to shut down FF before then install renewables.
For automation, the test bed is the solar system, and we need to give machine intel it's chance to build space habitats out of local materials. Eventually, depending on "smartness," we should be prepared to share the solar output, 50/50. But this deal is obviously for a far future generation, rather than dwellers of the inner solar system. -----Original Message----- From: smi...@zeelandnet.nl To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Cc: John Clark <johnkcl...@gmail.com> Sent: Sun, May 22, 2022 2:59 am Subject: Re: Self-Replicating Robots and Galactic Domination John Clark schreef op 19 mei '22: > On Thu, May 19, 2022 at 11:41 AM smitra <smi...@zonnet.nl> wrote: > > *> AI systems have still insect-level intelligence.* > > 10 years ago that might've been true, maybe even five, but not today. There has been a lot of progress in recent years. The problem with AI is that we cannot build the right sort of hardware, making the systems we have rather inefficient. We may now have systems that rival or exceed insect brain power, but only using very large and computationally inefficient systems. > >> * > The self-replicating machines will produce whatever chemical >> wasteproducts they can live with and they will be too dumb to realize >> that >> they are killing everything else.* > > If an AI decides to kill all biological life it won't be because it's > stupid, > and even if they do decide to do that it wouldn't explain why we don't > see > an engineered universe when we look at the night sky. Somebody has to > be > the first and I think it must be us. > Most living organisms on Earth today are not very intelligent at all. So, AI systems under development may soon be good enough to build self-replicating machinery for fully automated factories with. The AI systems running these factories don't need to be much smarter than insects. Such factories will outcompete conventional factories, so within a very short time period, most of our economy will run on such AI systems. The fact that many people have the ambition to build AI systems with human-level intelligence or even more, is also true, but that's not going to stop the use of insect-level AI systems in fully automated factories. What may then happen is that we gradually lose control over the self-replicating systems running the economy. Waste products produced by the system accumulate, so it becomes like a cancer killing the entire biosphere. If this sounds far-fetched, note that the current climate crisis is due to our economy producing CO2 and our resistance to reduce CO2 emissions. We find it difficult to reduce CO2 emissions because we need to take measures that will reduce out wealth to a limited degree (on the short term). If we have difficulties doing this for such a simple system (fossil fuels taken from the ground, burned in power plants to generate power) that can easily be modified without ruining the economy, think about how difficult it would be for the next generations to intervene in a system of self-replicating factories that starts to grow a bit out of control, producing toxic chemicals. They'll have the choice of adapting to live in a polluted world and still enjoy their enormous wealth without having to work for it, or go back to the sort of civilization we live in where you have to work hard to get a bit more than your basic needs. Given that it took us more than 40 years to finally do something about our CO2 emissions, I don't think we can be very confident that they'll promptly revert to the old way of living. A big obstacle being also that just like in case of climate change, this requires a global consensus. It's no good if China decides that self-replicating machines are with the pollution they produce and then refuses to put a stop to using them. So, I see this as just another phase in the evolution of life where technological lifeform arise and end up replacing all biological lifeforms except microbes. Saibal > John K Clark See what's on my new list at Extropolis > <https://groups.google.com/g/extropolis> > fal -- 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/225b1a4ac581a2b1c7dd7e1c947c7dc1%40zeelandnet.nl. -- 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/586476873.840426.1653272308641%40mail.yahoo.com.