candice schuster wrote:
Richard,
Thank you for your response. I have read your other posts and
understand what 'the story' is so to speak. I understand where you are
coming from and when I talk about evolution therioes this is not to
throw a 'stick in the wheel' so to speak, it is to think with a
universal mind. From my view point I want to know what the ultimate
goal is...I understand quite clearly that if you 'give a dog a bone'
with regards to AGI's that is all it will have however I battle to
understand the point.
You say...advanced technology...in what sense..is this AGI going to help
me think quicker ? Is this AGI going to reap massive benefits for my
company ? Is this AGI going to be my best friend ? Is this AGI purely
going to be a soldier ? Is this AGI going to help me understand logic ?
Do you see where I am going with this ? I understand technology and I
understand moving at a fast past, what I do not understand is the
benefit ? Perhaps you and AI live in the Science Fiction world and it's
not the other way round ??
Candice
At last an easy and fun question :-)
I want to introduce a term that I have started to use myself to describe
the type of AI that can be trusted: a "Safe And Friendly AI" or "SAFAI".
If someone built a SAFAI tomorrow the following would happen.
First it would recursively self-improve its own design. For the sake of
argument, we will suppose that they could get to the point where they
were thinking at a thousand times human speed (no need to assume better
intelligence: faster is good enough).
In the year following that point, we would be deluged by all of the
technology that would have been discovered in the next thousand years.
A quick summary of what that *could* entail.
Nanotechnology of the Drexlerian sort. That means invisible systems
that are completely safe (no damaging side effects whatsoever) which
could do many things. Most of the impact of a singularity would, in
fact, be a result of nanotechnology of this sort.
Some of the changes would involve systems that would:
- Go inside your cells (if you wished) and repair all damage, modify
the systems responsible for ageing, and (again, if you require) modify
the structure of your body to revert you to some younger age. This would
make you effectively immortal, barring accidents.
- Create systems for gathering energy from renewable sources, and from
sources off-planet, thus eliminating the need to damage the planet for
the sake of energy.
- Ditto for raw materials.
- Produce food in ways that did not require the use of surface land.
- Remove all the unnecessary buildings on the surface, compacting
cities to a very small, but very tall footprint.
- Remove all the garbage that has been deposited on the planet by humans.
- Generally return the ecology of the planet to a natural, wild state.
- Build space elevators to allow a steady traffic between the Earth
and the rest of the universe.
- Supply every individual on the planet with protection from whatever
they wanted to be protected from. No weapons would be available to
those who wanted to violate the private protections of any individual.
- Protect the historical, cultural heritage of the world.
- Allow any person to pursue whateover lifestyle they wanted, without
having to work to earn the things they wanted. there would be limits,
but these would be detemined by energy footprint. So long as you don't
want to use gigawatts of energy, probably no questions would be asked.
Personal spacecraft for interplanetary travel would probably be okay,
but interstellar craft would require a little more consideration.
- Allow people to create "domains" within which they and other
like-minded people could set up ways of life that would follow a certain
pattern: e.g. recreations of particular historical epochs and places,
like Classical Athens, or fantasy places, like a Harry Potter world.
- Give people the ability to move their minds from one location to
another. For example, to inhabit the sensorium of an animal of some
kind for a while. Or they could go inside a completely artificial world
(Gibsonian cyberspace, for example). Or they could become miniaturized.
- Provide a facility for letting people put some of their memories in
storage for a while. So for example, if you were bored with life, you
could enter one of the above mentioned "domains" that was specifically
designed only for people who had checked their memories at the door and
did not know, for the period they were inside, that the domain was not
real. So you could go into a Harry Potter world and actually be
convinced that this was "reality" for the time you were there.
*****
This is an off-the-cuff list of what could be done. More or less
straightforward to within the first few years, probably.
Other things would take longer to build because they would generate heat
that would have to be collected and dissipated, but one of the most
significant of these would be the creation of an underground zone,
replacing perhaps the first ten miles of the Earth's crust, which would
consist of one gigantic playground. In this playground there would be
room for each person now alive to have about 10,000 acres of open space
(with a ceiling about 100 feet high), together with roughly 10,000
"rooms" varying in size from a stadium to closet. Within each person's
private space they could create any environment they chose, with
materials on the walls and ceiling of the 10,000 acre estate to make it
seem like the area was outside on the surface of the planet.
The underground playground would be where most of the domains would be
located: there would be room enough down there for people to pool their
resources and do things like make a complete recreation of Classical
Athens and all of its environs, for example, supporting a population as
large as the original.
Most importantly, it would be possible for people to build ANY way of
life that they chose. If someone felt that it was important for humans
to be humans in the raw, they could set up domains in which life and
death were exactly as they are now (for example with real, unconstrained
violence within that reconstruction of Classical Athens), but perhaps
with the arrangement that if someone "died" within a domain they would
simply be removed and returned to the outside, remembering the way they
were before they went in.
Finally, it has to be emphasized that ALL of this could be done in such
a way that anyone who really did not want to take part -- who wanted to
live the kind of life we live now, with all its flaws, and with the same
risk of death, etc. that we have now -- could choose to not participate.
Nobody would be forced to do anything, they would be given complete
choice. The only thing people would not be able to do would be to force
their will upon others.
There are clearly borderline issues that would cause endless debate, but
those issues should not distract us from the larger picture.
*******
So Candice, you ask:
> ... in what sense is this AGI going to help me think quicker?
It would let you think quicker or slower, or not make any changes: your
choice how you want to change the way your mind works.
> Is this AGI going to reap massive benefits for my company ?
"Companies" would, as you can see, be of no relevance.
> Is this AGI going to be my best friend ?
If you want it to be. Or it could stay as invisible as trees are to you
today (invisible as a friend, that is).
> Is this AGI purely going to be a soldier ?
No.
> Is this AGI going to help me understand logic ?
It could help you understand anything, if you asked.
To tell the truth, I think the consequence might be more than you were
expecting them to be.
This is my vision of what a "Bright Green Tomorrow" could be like.
Let me know if you have questions.
Richard Loosemore.
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