Re: [singularity] Is Might-Be-Friendly AI Bunk?

[Russell Wallace]

After an exchange of private email with Brian, I figured out what I think is the most illuminating answer to this question:

What would be the outcome of a fight between the USS Enterprise and an Imperial Star Destroyer? (Believe it or not, a fair number of electrons have been spilled on this one.)

The answer is of course that the postulated situation is so counterfactual that there isn't a meaningful answer based on what we know about the real world.

But we can't prove that, can we? There are people who claim to know in outline how to travel faster than light, for example.

Sure. But by the time you've extrapolated that far, you've had to fill in a huge number of details. So many, in fact, that the eventual answer doesn't come from Einstein's equations that were put through the mangler to come up with a plausible excuse for warp drive, hyperdrive etc, actual data on performance of lasers that were multiplied by some arbitrary number to get a figure for the starship's main guns etc.

So where does it come from?

Well, my answer is that the Star Destroyer would kick seven colors out of the Enterprise.

I think you can probably guess where that answer comes from - and how that translates into the relevance of answers to the question that started this thread.

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