Re-Evolving Mind, Hans Moravec, December 2000 Computers have permeated everyday life and are worming their way into our gadgets, dwellings, clothes, even bodies. But if pervasive computing soon automates most of our informational needs, it will leave untouched a vaster number of essential physical tasks. Construction, protection, repair, cleaning, transport and so forth will remain in human hands. Robot inventors in home, university and industrial laboratories have tinkered with the problem for most of the century. The first electronic computers in the 1950s did the work of thousands of clerks. But things are changing. The short answer is that, after decades at about one MIPS (million instructions (or calculations) per second), computer power available to research robots shot through 10, 100 and now 1,000 MIPS starting about 1990 (Figure 1). It was a common opinion in the AI labs that, with the right program, readily available computers could encompass any human skill. It's easy to explain the discrepancy in hindsight.
Goertzel Contra Dvorsky on Mind Uploading Futurist pundit George Dvorsky recently posted an article on io9, labeled as “DEBUNKERY” and aimed at the topic of mind uploading. According to the good Mr. Dvorsky, “You’ll Probably Never Upload Your Mind into a Computer.” He briefly lists eight reasons why, in his view, mind uploading will likely never happen. UPDATE - here is a video interview on this subject: Note that he’s not merely arguing that mind uploading may come too late for you and me to take advantage of it – he’s arguing that it probably will never happen at all! The topic of Dvorsky’s skeptical screed is dear to my heart and mind. Every one of Dvorsky's objections has been aired many times before – which is fine, as his post is a journalistic article, not an original scientific or philosophic work, so it doesn’t necessarily have to break new ground. In this article I will briefly run through Dvorsky’s eight objections, and give my own, in some cases idiosyncratic, take on each of them. But, whatever…. So what? True enough.
How Self-Replicating Spacecraft Could Take Over the Galaxy I'm going to re-post here a previous comment I made on this subject, because I think it's worth repeating. Any alien civilization that is sufficiently developed enough to span the cosmos, will be so far advanced from us, that we would not be able to even comprehend their technology and in turn they probably wouldn't even recognise us as a sentient intelligent species. I've always found the "Well if there are aliens why haven't they said hello?" argument to be far too arrogant. There are islands all over the oceans of our world that are nothing more than rocks sticking out of the water with bacteria on them. That's us, the barren rock. The alien probes have probably been through out solar system many times (we'd never know) looked at our skyscrapers, cities and agriculture.
How to build a Dyson sphere in five (relatively) easy steps If you have energy, you can launch as much mass as you want into space. If you have enough mass, you have a radiation shield, and with the energy from your swarm, you can spin that mass for gravity. These are not issues. Well we could live on Earth and just keep the dyson swarm inside the orbit of Mercury. Of course our planet would be in perpetual darkness then but that's an exercise left to the student. Problems I see with launching mass to block radiation is that mass would block ALL radiation including visible light. Where does that mass come from? Even if you do build structures large enough to support humans for extended periods of time, and you spin them to create centrifugal force (not gravity), that doesn't solve the radiation issue. Not everything is based on energy production, as you wrote above. Also, as other commenters have pointed out, if we direct the energy from these swarms to Earth, something has to be done with it.
Answering the Fermi Paradox: Exploring the Mechanisms of Universal Transcension, John Smart, 2002-2010 Answering the Fermi Paradox: Exploring the Mechanisms of Universal Transcension © 2002-2011, John M. Smart. For a more recent brief paper on this topic, see: Smart, J.M. 2011. Overview I wrote this piece as a formal response to the Fermi paradox, one of the most fascinating open questions about the long term destiny of intelligence in the universe. Abstract I propose that humanity's descendants will not be colonizing outer space. Introduction to the Transcension Scenario Once hyperexponentiating computation has permeated virtually all the local matter and energy in its vicinity, what must it do next? In transcension, once intelligence saturates its local environment, it is constrained to leave local spacetime. Cosmologist Lee Smolin, first in a 1992 paper ("Did the Universe Evolve?" In Smolin's calculations, our universe appears tuned both to exist for billennia and to be fecund for black hole creation. . Parsing the Drake Equation 1.
How to Measure the Power of Alien Civilizations Using the Kardashev Scale I believe that one of the criticisms of Dyson Spheres is that any civilization that could build one would never do it because they would have already developed even more advanced technologies to make them unnecessary or obsolete. I've never seen the real point, of any civilization moving past an extremely refined post type 1, pre-type II civilization. After a civilization discovered sustainable fusion, and the use of easily accessable materials to maintain such energy consumption, they could in theory terraform any planetary body into a new home, simply if the raw materials were available. Those materials are available. If the have that ability, then every individual conceivably could live in scarcity free opulence with ease, and doing so would be quite sustainable. As life spans and individual ability and knowledge increased thought various means, I couldn't see why population rates would necessarily just keep growing forever without reason.
Why You Should Upload Yourself to a Supercomputer There is, of course, the possibility that uploading yourself to a computer will in fact destroy you. The computer may retain your memories and neural map. It is likely to retain your ability to respond to stimuli. What it may destroy is, well, you. What if our humanity and our intelligence relies on biological (or supernatural, just to put it out there) interactions to provide consciousness? Would there even be a way to know? Flagged George addressed that issue in his previous post (under "7. The myth of the starship (NB: As starships do not in fact exist, no starships were harmed in the production of this essay. Also, this is just words. If they upset you, go lie down in a dark room for half an hour then drink a glass of water; you'll feel better.) Actually, I tell a lie. There are five starships that we know of; Pioneer 10, Pioneer 11, Voyager 1, Voyager 2, and New Horizons. We are 4.37 light years, or 140 million light-seconds, from Alpha Centauri, give or take. And that's the best we've done to date, admittedly without really trying ... This is not an essay about whether we could do better if we tried. The very word "starship" is a concatenation of two other words — star, and ship. The astute reader will have spotted the link to the Apollo Program above. But there's a more subtle difference. As I've said before, the trouble with going into space is that there's no "there" there when you get to the other end of your voyage. Such an interstellar capability isn't going to look much like a "ship".