Heh, I'd forgotten about Golgafrincham. It's funny because it's true!
The problem lies with the permeable and dynamic boundaries of all these things. And "symbiont" captures the fuzziness of the boundaries quite well. As we've argued till we're blue, _general_ intelligence may well be illusory. It's possible (if not likely) that the only general intelligence we can build will be just as symbiotic with the milieu as we are. Maybe the AI won't rely directly on gut microbes. Maybe it will rely on some other huge population of nanomachines that requires an entire earth to maintain ... perhaps the robot overlords will need promechanic pills to keep their gut nanomachines in healthy proportions. I have no idea, which is why I called it "faith" and hand-waved toward the inadequate closures of our current machines. Yes, I used "wonky" in order to prevent my email text from ballooning out of control. But "pathology" has (almost) a worse type of ambiguity to it because it implies an assumed state of health or normality that wonky doesn't imply. It's fine to adapt to wonky things if one is adaptable enough, like learning to ride a backwards brain bicycle http://www.instructables.com/id/Reverse-steering-bike/. Pathology is almost universally considered bad.) On 06/10/2016 10:12 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
If some subset of humanity build a general artificial intelligence, and that intelligence takes over, or leaves, I don't see what gut biomes or ISIS matter. Nor do I see why wonkiness (w.r.t. Glen's last e-mail) must occur within a (sub)population of cybernetic or genetically engineered super-intelligent humans that separate themselves from (or control) a legacy human population -- either for biological or sociological reasons. Sure it could occur. Why must it occur? (Here I am assuming that `wonky' isn't just a word with a purposely ambiguous meaning, but is meant to suggest some sort of systemic pathology. -----Original Message----- From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Carl Sent: Friday, June 10, 2016 10:59 AM I was thinking of symbiont in terms of mitochondria, gut biomes, HERVs, etc. I'm also rather increasingly fond of 1G, so if I am to give that up, it doesn't seem to me that some long-term fractional G is going to be worth it. You are of course familiar with Golgafrincham?
-- ☣ glen ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
