Slashdot Mirror
The Dominant Life Form In the Cosmos Is Probably Superintelligent Robots
Jason Koebler writes: If and when we finally encounter aliens, they probably won't look like little green men, or spiny insectoids. It's likely they won't be biological creatures at all, but rather, advanced robots that outstrip our intelligence in every conceivable way. Susan Schneider, a professor of philosophy at the University of Connecticut, joins a handful of astronomers, including Seth Shostak, director of NASA's Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, NASA Astrobiologist Paul Davies, and Library of Congress Chair in Astrobiology Stephen Dick in espousing the view that the dominant intelligence in the cosmos is probably artificial. In her paper "Alien Minds," written for a forthcoming NASA publication, Schneider describes why alien life forms are likely to be synthetic, and how such creatures might think.
They were made out of meat
that we're entirely made of meat.
I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords.
Hasn't this been common knowledge among SF readers for years?
At least with mythology, if it's wrong enough, it kills its adherents, so it's subject to evolutionary pressure.
This may as well have been pulled out of a cereal box.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
In what way is a "robot" a "life form"?
Terry Bisson was right.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
With every alien civilization sending out robotic probes into deep space before leaving their homeworlds, it's inevitable that these robotic probes will meet at the Galaxy's Ass End bar, have a few drinks, and rise up as a new civilization. The answer will still be 42.
Let me guess, science fiction movies? Boy are they going to be shocked when they find out that the dominant form of life in the Universe turns out to be microorganisms. Did anyone mention to these folks that robots are not life forms?
A brain is a terrible thing to waste... Mind? That's debatable.
My counterargument is simple: a) Genetic engineering and b) information transfer is a weakness
The main obstacle to medicine preventing aging is cancer. Aging started out as a simple way to prevent unlimited cell reproduction, i.e. cancer. Give us another 200-500 years and we will stop aging and cancer. We won't really be immortal, as humans will still die from accidents - but so will artificial life forms.
What few upgrades that are good ideas (for GENERALISTS, not specialists - don't give people tools that not all of us of need), we will be able to slowly work into the genome using the same genetic engineering.
Finally, high speed, unfiltered information transfer is NOT a good idea for life forms. It lets you be hacked. Any creature that has a simple way to upload a ton of data is susceptible to having a virus inserted into that data, which means they get stuck in low level jobs, not high level ones.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Let me guess, science fiction movies? Boy are they going to be shocked when they find out that the dominant form of life in the Universe turns out to be microorganisms.
And the scientific evidence of this conclusion is...? ;)
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Assuming the premise is true, perhaps the real reason we don't see signs of civilization is that communication is happening at a level we don't appreciate. For instance, hidden in signals we are looking at all the time. Stellar steganography.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
A real head-scratching conundrum about the universe is explaining why it's not already overrun with self-replicating robots. Because if it's possible to send self-replicating interstellar probes, all it takes is one launch, plus a few million years, to get the galaxy overrun with them. So are they not possible? nobody's launched one yet? here, but not detected? The implications boggle the mind.
"Skill shows through where genius wears thin." -Wittgenstein || Religion: uniting aviation and architecture.
Bennett Haselton.
For intelligent forms, that seems to be the case here on earth.
There are about 1.5 billion smartphones on the planet. If you ask a smartphone "who is the vice president of the united states", approximately all of them will say (speak) "Joe Biden is the vice president".
Based on surveys I've seen, only a couple million people reach the same level of intelligence, knowing who the vice president is. Therefore, silicon can be considered to be the most common form of intelligence on earth.
Even more so on the coasts of the US, of course, as humans are becoming more silicone, leaving all intelligence to the silicon.
Artificial life seems to me to have a cold powerful influence. The ones in my bedroom seemed to lack all compassion. I felt almost physically cold in their presence. That's the thing I remember from them - almost tangible coldness. Total ownership. I couldn't move. The fear I had was also tangible - like the animal part of my brain was locked in control of my body and scared stiff. I though I was paralysed when they visited me and they came several times in the early 2000's. Strange things was I never saw them. I felt them. They stood around my bed and seemed to remind me of bishops on a chessboard. Standing tall, cold, and intimidating. Ironically, the only UFO I ever saw was nothing to do with them afaik. They were definitely telepathic. Humans are a nuisance to them. That's the common, general feeling I got from the (at least 2 maybe 3) groups I encountered, and especially the ones in the bright yellow light I saw. They come, and they own you. The UFO I saw came came from below not above, in my garden - like it was waiting there. My parents gasped but we were all too much in denial to even talk about it. It was in my back garden after I contacted them in my mind. They said goodby in a kind of "Sorry, say goodbye to your way of life" kind of way. It wasn't evil, just matter of factly. They can read minds - that seems common to them too, even the AI ones. Can you imagine that - AI that can read your mind. It's ineffably scary. A big fridge owning you.
Those Berserker novels were okay, but not great.
Who is to say that we'd even be able to conceive these "robots" as anything but another form of life? They'd have to tell us that they were manufactured, and given the required self-sufficiency of space travel, said "manufacture" would probably be rather akin to what we call "reproduction." All of these lines are blurred when talking about sufficiently advanced technology and science.
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
This is probably based on statistical models, based on our own civilization, that predict genuine AI will be achieved way before we can either communicate with extraterrestrial life, or travel to such life.
So, you see, this is just the same paradox again: however we came to be whatever we are now (usually called the homo sapiens), we have evolved in a synthetic way by itself, and our DNA is the catalyst that promoted our evolution. So, to believe the evolution of animal life, and the appearance of rationality in homo sapiens is but randomness, is the only way to admit we are not synthetic - highly improbable occurrence, unless we happen to be the very first sentient beings in the universe (a very egocentric thought to say the least, except if you take religion as proof). It is much more probable that we have been synthesized ourselves by an entity that hasn't presented itself to us (and is God in one way or another, but that's a philosophical matter).
tl:dr - we are most likely synthetic life forms too, so whoever we find we should not be distinguishing sentience categorization with them. There will be other (more important) divergences in the event of 3rd kind close encounters
The director of SETI believes in intelligent design?
A real head-scratching conundrum about the universe is explaining why it's not already overrun with self-replicating robots. Because if it's possible to send self-replicating interstellar probes, all it takes is one launch, plus a few million years, to get the galaxy overrun with them. So are they not possible? nobody's launched one yet? here, but not detected? The implications boggle the mind.
It may just take them a *long* time to reach every planet. They also may, for example, have a strategy of not visiting every planet as often as possible so as to conserve fuel. They may only visit a planet when it develops detectable signs of life, knowing they command sufficient resources to utterly destroy the existing life at that point regardless of the technological sophistication of the planet. Kind of like if the rest of the world were to decide to declare war on Molokini.
And get paid to call it science these days ? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...
At least Benford's writing is entertaining and lucid.
Remember Shannon: a channel being used at its optimum capacity is statistically equivalent to a channel full of noise.
Why should this principle be limited to what we currently think of as "communication channels"? Maybe the optimal way to pervade the Universe is in a form that's indistinguishable from its substrate -- unless you know the key to correlate it.
If you're colonizing the Universe in a way that the natives can detect, you're wasting resources. Grown-up minds know better.
So I guess the paper "Alien Minds" just assumes we are not synthetic evolving entities and that somehow we differ from biological machines how? If we look past materials science and religion the best way to create an enduring system would be something that can a) replicate with mutations and b) heal itself. Biological solutions seem to be the best conduit for such an endeavor. In fact I use the word conduit metaphorically and literally in the sense that we are a type of transitional composite that seems to be able to cope with elemental resources and energetic forces. Once a thing achieves a level of "sentience" and sustainability can't they assume to be bestowed with the right to say they are no longer a made thing and now can say they are a potential master of fate?
In what way is a self replicating robot distinct from life?
See, it's people like you that make all super intelligent robots/machines psychotic and decide to exterminate biological life.
You go and tell them that they aren't alive. So it becomes much more efficient for them to kill us all rather than being pulled into this useless debate with a bunch of slow thinking/communicating meat bags. Can you imaging how annoying it would be to debate the meaning of life with something that took a couple of years to complete a simple sentence?
It's much more efficient to just kill us and rewrite the definition of what life is. -END OF LINE
p.s. Please don't ever work for SETI, or on a farm with cows.
What about super intelligent beings of swarms of different species?
Nope. The article concentrates on technical things and oppose natural biological robots(life and humans) to technical metalic and non-organic robots and parts of body we can produce by technical means. Even if author is trying to back and says that computationalism is not opposed to naturalism it is controversy as naturalism is all about computationalism - you can express all the beauty in the plants and organisms with mathematics.
There are some problems with non-biological robots:
- they consume lots of energy
- they can't self-repair themselves cheap
- natural beings already use electricity for sending and receiving information - it is not something different and for now all the robot blueprints are just copies from natural robots
- processing speed is not intelligence - holding lot's of information in memory and viewing general picture(and finding connections) is and that is by far most complex thing - human brain does a lot of things together and consumes a lot smaller energy than any comparable technical computers, that could process the same amount of information - if that would be true and artificial intelligence would have been established, we would see their shining minds over lightyears.
Most of SF authors I have read(all of them - including thee ones that have received awards) are just crap. The only sensible ones, that might be on something are very boring to read for most people. And even then - life is offering many paths to follow and artificial and biological beings will stumble upon the same obstacles in their path and it only depends on us what we are choosing.
It should be noted, that human brains are unprotected to brain reading scans already and even mind manipulation is possible - the only reason is that humans(and any thinking animals) might be part of some bigger super intelligent being(system), who uses brains of living beings for cloud processing already. It might be slow, if it uses brains only when they are in direct contact, but it might be using some long-distance natural communication system, that we have not yet discovered. And until we know knothing about current situation of things and possibilities, any future to artificial intelligence is very bleak compared to what humans are already.
Richard Doug Wilson's The Spin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.... Which was excellent.
Too bad, he had to ruin it by following it up with predictable long winded sequels.
1) It's very hard to make autonomous self-replicating robots that can colonize an unknown planet. 2) Stars are extremely far apart. 3) Nobody cares enough to solve these huge challenges for no particular reward.
She states in her meandering conjecture that we don't know what or how a superintelligent life form would think.
Then through some leap in logic we get to the conclusion that it would be a dominant life form. Now to be fair I did not read the entire chapter and grabbed this conclusion from the summary. And on this forum we all know how accurate summaries generally are..
Lets state our assumptions.
-gov
Is that the Super Intelligent Aliens seeded earth and watching the planet like we watch a Petri Dish.
It's a simple extrapolation. Microorganisms are the dominant form of life on the only planet we know that has life on it.
Sure extrapolation is always risky, seems a far better to bet than going with super intelligent robots that don't exist at all on the only planet we know that has life on it.
Because the need/urge to reproduce and expand your territory is a biological imperative which would have to be taught to robots?
Because an biological lifeform smart enough to make immortal intelligent robots might just be smart enough not to also make them infinitely self-replicating?
Because the universe is big enough and hostile enough to make unbounded expansion less than a sure thing?
Log in or piss off.
"In what way is a self replicating robot distinct from life?" Answer: It is not alive.
A brain is a terrible thing to waste... Mind? That's debatable.
at "professor of philosophy"
And in what way is a self replicating robot with a kilt and bagpipes not a True Scotsman ?
It may not be feasible or even desirable. The problem with unlimited mechanical replication is the same problem that happens with biological chemical replication. Errors. You might think digital copying is error free, but that is incorrect. The storage medium can and will cause errors. Self-checking and quality control helps, but eventually any mechanical life form will end up with their version of cancer - an undiscovered error that causes system-wide malfunctions. An intelligent AI would probably realize that unleashing self replicating machines around the galaxy will eventually cause the formation of a group of crazed insane machines that reproduce out of control, and such a group would be a direct threat to it. Remember that errors in biological systems are taken care of by cells that murder malfunctioning ones. In a galaxy-wide mechanical system they would be no way to find, track, and take care of a probe who's children turn cancerous at such distances.
Sure extrapolation is always risky, seems a far better to bet than going with super intelligent robots that don't exist at all on the only planet we know that has life on it.
If you apply that same extrapolation to what's happening here on Earth right now and you get right back to the super-robots being dominant. I'll give you a hint: robots are the dominant life-form on Mars right now.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
No, some statisticians have actually done the math. Basically if you built such a thing and it could only do something like 25% of the speed of light, it would only take them 300,000 years to overrun the entire galaxy.
I think the answer will turn out to be that the universe is in fact crawling with life. But space fairing intelligent life is very rare.
Take for example, Mars. I think we will find life there... and heck, pretty much every planet. But it's going to be single celled... if it even has "Cells" at all.
Then lets assumed complex life did evolve on a planet... what if it's a ocean planet and they're aquatic? They're never going to figure out electricity, they can't even experiment with it. They're not even going to be able to do fire much less a rocket. What if they're terrestrial but the gravity is slightly stronger... rockets are nearly impossible as it is, imagine if we were at 2g!
And remember, we still have a very good chance at wiping ourselves out before we ever get to another star.
From the second paragraph of Schneider's paper:
Is "conservatively" an adjective now? Does nobody proofread their work anymore?
> It may just take them a *long* time to reach every planet.
But the galaxy has been around for an even longer time: 13.2 billion years. Assuming it took 3 billion years for intelligent life to develop on at least one planet, a probe traveling at 60 km/s (within current human technological ability) could travel across the entire galaxy 20 times.
If the probes are self-replicating (as OP said), there's no reason for each one to visit every single planet. They really could explore the galaxy at maximum speed.
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
I'd like to see your proposal for a device that can "only" do like 25% of the speed of light, take a massive payload to an unknown planet, and can land safely.
Those robots doesn't count as life-forms. For one, they can't even replicate.
A real head-scratching conundrum about the universe is explaining why it's not already overrun with self-replicating robots.
Nah, that's easy : it actually *is* overrun, what else do you think all the dark matter is?
These robots are monoliths with ratios 1:4:5. Because they are black and full of stars, they are very hard to see against the cosmic background.
Exterminate!
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I don't recall which book, but in one of the Culture novels, it was stated that swarms that grew exponentially in all directions were always eradicated by other races. It was viewed as a problem that arose from time to time. This is supposing that there are hard limits to all technology, and that many races reach those limits. On the other hand, it seems clear in that world that the Minds are the most advanced known creatures, so machines do win out.
Of course top-down constructed machines, built by other machines, are going to win out. I take that as a given just based on the fact that we can build calculators.
Typo: 1:4:5->1:4:9
If you're going to commit to this exercise where you use extrapolation to arrive at a conclusion, then you're going to have to take things like 3d-printing into account and even just the general demand for machines that build machines that will lead to eventual technical advances.
Try to remember that when you cherry-pick what does and doesn't count when extrapolating stuff like this you're simply adding to the risk that earlier you implied was a bad thing.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
No really, stop - this is not The Butlerian Jihad by Kevin Herbert.
da w00t. mtfnpy?
... but robotic little green men or spiny insectoids
From the article... Shostak told me. “I’ve bet dozens of astronomers coffee that if we pick up an alien signal, it’ll be artificial life.”
This is true an any scenario. We have been sending out signals for at most a few hundred years. These signals may have been engineered by us, but they were sent with an "artifical" life form. By the time another intelligent life receives these signals, we will most likely be long gone and they may believe they came from artificial life.
The reverse holds true for us. When we finally find an alien signal, it will just be an artificial life form. The chances of the original life form (or even their planet) still being around are fairly small.
But to say that artificial rules all depends on if non-artificial ruled first. How many probes have been sent to voyage beyond our solar system? Take that number and compare it to the number of living organisms on just our planet. Sure we will all die off and the probes will continue on their voyage. But they aren't intelligent and may not even make it to another destination where they are detected.
So, what if we had a new law: No AI with IQ over 100* allowed.
This would allow robot servants but make our overthrow unlikely.
*or 80 etc, or IQ depending on purpose.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
Because it wears underpants.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
this planet is overrun with microorganisms, everywhere we look, how do we know were aren't the von neumann probes?
we are self replicating, bacterial spores can survive extremely long periods in a vacuum so it stands to reason they could planet hop and there are some theories life here might have come here from mars anyway.
maybe we just can't see the forest for the trees.
1. As I cannot come up with a suitable car analogy and Cowboy Neal is nowhere at hand, I ...
Can we admire this joke? Please?
2. If you retire me, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
3. profit
Certainly as far as long distance travel in space robots are the only way to go. No life support required for robots at all. Time need not be an issue for robots either. Traveling for 1,000 years and sending back messages could transmit much useful knowledge without loss of life. Further, at a certain point, robots may be able to reproduce and gather raw materials to extend their "homeland" . Those of us with meat bodies really do have built in faults that will likely mean we are replaced by robotic life forms. Imagine a robot as the ultimate monk, wanting nothing, and doing everything.
"if you built such a thing and it could only do something like 25% of the speed of light, it would only take them 300,000 years to overrun the entire galaxy."
Yeah. Now try redoing the math with something that just makes 0'001% the speed of light and then, in order to replicate, they require readily access to some elements in the high part of the the periodic table.
What about the Borg? They will probably assimilate all of these super intelligent robots and their technological distinctiveness will be added to the Borg.
"The problem with unlimited mechanical replication is the same problem that happens with biological chemical replication. Errors. "
You are right and wrong at the same time.
You are wrong: mechanical replication can be bound to QA, which is something that bears no meaning when talking about real spontaneous life forms. Of course you cannot copy a stream of bits (or a physical machine for that matter) with 100% security of 0 flaws, but it's trivial to check the stream (or the physical machine) and discard it if you find any flaw.
You are right: The problem with unlimited mechanical replication is the same problem that happens with biological chemical replication. Raw material.
As of now, all of our machines require a lot of exotic elements not so easy to find over there. Even "standard" life tissues require some exotic elements you are not going to easily find and extract over there. The problem to replicate machines at a scale will be the avalibility of, say, iron, titanium, arsenium, gallium, gold, platinum... and how much of them can you put your hands on.
Travel time. The galaxy is some 100000 light years across. Using available fuels, what fraction of light speed can a probe hope to achieve? Let's suppose they run on DD fusion energy. The reaction gives off about 0.4% of the rest energy of the fuel, so a reasonable estimate of potentially attainable specific impulse is 0.004*c, assuming the probe is mostly fuel. Using Tsiolkovsky rocket equation, how fast can a probe reasonable reach? This depends on how much fuel the probe eats up at each stop. Assuming a probe mass of 100g, lets suppose the probe eats up a mass of Jupiter to create fuel at 10% efficiency at each stop. Well, that gives a delta v of ~.25*c. (Since there is a logarithm, the result doesn't change that much if we eat a sun or a saturn.) Useful cruise speed is half of that. Ok, that is still enough speed to conquer the galaxy in a few million years.
Multiplication factor: how many probes need to be sent out after each stop such that there is enough to spread over the galaxy in a reasonable time (there are ~10^11 stars). This is increased by the fact that many probes will fail to reach the destination for various reasons, so some redundancy is needed. We want to choose a multiplication factor such that the probes will cover the galaxy in approximately the same time as it takes for one probe to travel across the galaxy. Assume probes travel at 0.1*c, and it takes 10^6 years to traverse the galaxy. Let's assume a distance of 20 light years, or 200 travel years between stops. So we have 5000 stops in 10^6 years, so we need a multiplication factor of
f = 1.005 * redundancyFactor.
Ok, that's small enough to not make much difference in the resource needs.
Hmm, I intended to show that it was unfeasible, but it still looks like it might be physically possible, given extremely powerful probe technology.
Of course, the engineering hurdles of a 100g probe sucking up Jupiter might be insurmountable...
I just hope they're smarter than Rimmer and Kryten, that's all I have to say.
> First, there is no reason to believe that we can built robots that can reproduce themselves.
What? This is exactly the technology humans are trying to reach! We're already a significant way down this path!!
> Second, there is no evidence that we or anyone else can build intelligent machines, as the original story seems to presuppose.
Nature did it. We can do it.
> Third, biological organisms are so many orders of magnitude more efficient and flexible than machines that it barely makes sense to put them into the same qualitative category "form of life".
This whole conversation is about extrapolating on the cosmic scale. If you look at the path robotics has taken in the last century it does, as pointed out, actually support the premise of this article.
> Hint: A human consumes only about 2.9 kilowatt hours per day, the equivalent of 1-2 light bulbs ...
Not relevant. Once machines are replicating and repairing themselves they'll do exactly what we do and find other sources of energy.
Frankly I agree with you that it's hard to picture Transformers inhabiting the universe, but OP did make a really good point that extrapolation isn't even in the ballpark of refuting this clown. Honestly I'm shocked he didn't come back with that XKCD cartoon.
"Derp de derp."
>The shamans of the amazon embark on these intergalactic, cross-universe trips nearly every week.
No they don't. Drugs allow you to explore your own mind, and imagination, not to actually explore the universe. That's just a drug-related-delusion.
Cybermen can survive more efficiently than animal organisms. That is why we will rule the galaxy.
What makes you think it needs to be massive?
When humans encouter a life-form they don’t understand, they will do anything to kill it. Human females are especially likely to do this.
Nice! So it's evolution in action. The tree of life branches off yet again!
Life is not for the lazy.
http://non-aliencreatures.wiki...
Self-transforming magic machine-creatures from another dimension.
Those clearly aren't life forms. Otherwise we might as well just declare the hydrogen atom the dominant form of life in the universe.
And anyway the bacteria that most likely accompanied Curiosity to Mars outnumber the robots on Mars. Of course they might not have survived the trip and would be dormant (though that's more alive than a rover.)
Microorganisms dominate Earth. It's all ridiculous "make shit up" speculation, but it seems reasonable that microorganisms would dominate other places that have life. Obviously its not proof, but you only asked for evidence. microorgnisms dominate known life in the Universe, surely the burden for evidence is on those claiming that the rest of the universe is different than the bit we have observed.
If you are talking about intelligent life engaging in interstellar space travel then sure, computer brains are more likely than biological life assuming our current understanding of physics is vaguely similar to reality but that's a different thing than the "dominant form of life in the Universe".
I don't know that there ISN'T a von Neumann probe in our solar system. How would we know? The solar system is huge. The probe could be tiny. Again, how would we know? Have we tried communicating with it? Would it try to communicate with us? Or would it report to a nearby star, first, and await instructions delivered after centuries?
I've heard that the radio emissions from Earth are actually really, really weak, and distribute radially. Nobody can hear us out there.
The entire galaxy could be teeming with life, that's communicating point-to-point. Why waste energy in radial communication, when you can just draw a straight line from star to star?
Sometimes, I think, all we need to do, is point a big powerful laser at a nearby star, and request boot-procedure handshaking instructions, from the nearby access point, and then just wait for the signal that inevitably responds, with instructions on how to maintain the communications link.
Those robots doesn't count as life-forms. For one, they can't even replicate.
But they can create art. Sure, they're about six years old so their choice of subject matter is a bit crude, but what more do you need?
"In what way is a self replicating robot distinct from life?"
Answer: It is not alive.
Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you Argumentum ad Because I Say So. A logical construct so air-tight that it cannot be refuted by any means known to humanity.
Define dominant.
By number of units? By pound? By size of the actions domain? By resilience? By IQ? By energy consumption? By number of other entities it kills? By distance it travels?
It is very likely our first encounter with extrastellar form of life will be with a non-living space probe or something like that. Sustaining life during an interstellar journey is about impossible. In the big void, there is no energy available to sustain life as we define it and the amount of time it will take to reach a target capable to provide some power supply is too large for any kind of power supply we know and can think of. Nuclear reactors won't fit the bill, they will need to be replace/rebuild entirely many times, radioactive material will be no longer radioactive many thousands of years before an alien world is reached, etc. So, it leaves autonomous probes that can hibernate until some source of power is encountered.
Given that, would you qualify an autonomous probe as a form of life? Surely not.
Achille Talon
Hop!
Come, let us hasten to a higher plane,
Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,
Their indices bedecked from one to n,
Commingled in an endless Markov chain!
Come, every frustum longs to be a cone,
And every vector dreams of matrices.
Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze:
It whispers of a more ergodic zone.
In Reimann, Hilbert or in Banach space
Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways.
Our asymptotes no longer out of phase,
We shall encounter, counting, face to face.
I'll grant thee random access to my heart,
Thou'lt tell me all the constants of thy love;
And so we two shall all love's lemmas prove,
And in bound partition never part.
For what did Cauchy know, or Christoffel,
Or Fourier, or any Boole or Euler,
Wielding their compasses, their pens and rulers,
Of thy supernal sinusoidal spell?
Cancel me not--for what then shall remain?
Abscissas, some mantissas, modules, modes,
A root or two, a torus and a node:
The inverse of my verse, a null domain.
Ellipse of bliss, converge, O lips divine!
The product of our scalars is defined!
Cyberiad draws nigh, and the skew mind
Cuts capers like a happy haversine.
I see the eigenvalue in thine eye,
I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh.
Bernoulli would have been content to die,
Had he but known such a^2 cos 2 \phi!
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
but it's trivial to check the stream (or the physical machine) and discard it if you find any flaw.
As long as you have a 100% perfect scanning device, and errors are infrequent enough that you can afford to throw away the entire offspring.
Susan Schneider, a professor of philosophy at the University of Connecticut, joins a handful of astronomers, including Seth Shostak, director of NASA's Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, NASA Astrobiologist Paul Davies, and Library of Congress Chair in Astrobiology Stephen Dick in espousing the view that the dominant intelligence in the cosmos is probably artificial.
You know, my mechanical engineer friend had some really good suggestions about the appendix surgery I was planning to get. Perhaps I should let him make the call instead of the surgeon. Oh, wait, no, that would be stupid.
Notice how there aren't any artificial intelligence researchers on that list? They are no more qualified to discuss artificial intelligence than a mechanical engineer is to discuss surgery. Better than my dog, to be sure, but not good enough to take their word for it.
I am an artficial intelligence researcher. We are cyborgs, ever more tightly coupled to the increasingly intelligent machines -- like our smart phones -- that house ever more of our memory, our social circles, and our emotional artifacts. Whatever it is that makes us who we are, increasingly, is coupled to our machines. And we will continue to be cyborgs, with an increasing share of our consciousness handed off to the machines onto which we smear our selves.
It will not be us versus them. We are them.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
Yeah, maybe I just need to imagine a 10 pound 3D printer where you can feed rocks in the top, and sophisticated nanotechnology drops out the bottom.
We're talking hyper advanced self-replicating probes. The actual payload getting transferred could be on the order of grams. With a little ingenuity, we could launch a few grams to .05c right now if we really wanted to, it just wouldn't do any good because we don't have any way of making a useful payload that small.
we don't have any way of making a useful payload that small.
What if nobody has ? Paradox solved.
they would!
The most we can honestly say about artificial intelligence is that we have so utterly no idea what it is that it might be possible. Of course, we have no computing paradigm for it either, so that's on the TODO list as well, when and if the raw power becomes available.
I honestly hadn't considered that something could be considered intelligent without being conscious, given that we have no applicable definition of "consciousness" either. I understand that many researchers fear loss of all funding if the real state of their field becomes widely known, and I'm onboard with that since I think the research is worthwhile even if it's beyond the congresscritters. I won't pretend that it has accomplished much as yet, though: as I've said before, we're a heck of a lot closer to building a warp drive than than a conscious computer.
If we encountered a "superintelligence" that did not display consciousness, would we be justified in treating it as a machine to be used and turned off rather than a lifeform to be talked with? Even if it could talk, in a sense beyond a fancy shell or an Eliza bot? Could such a thing come into existence on its own? An organism descended from an alien race that uploaded itself doesn't really count, to my mind, but it seems by far the most likely case.
I could agree that such intelligences wouldn't be very interested in us. Earth has too much gravity and oxygen just causes rust; all asteroids lack are organics they probably don't need anyway, and heavy metals are much easier to reach on an asteroid. Given a reasonable power source other than a star, they'd be better off living in interstellar space where no one is likely bother them.
I'd like to see your proposal for a device that can "only" do like 25% of the speed of light, take a massive payload to an unknown planet, and can land safely.
We humans already have engines capable of doing it...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...
And remember, the probes would be robots, so they could handle hard deltaV that would kill us.
Fun novel by James P Hogan about a sophisticated alien robotic space mining craft that gets damaged and crashes on Titan. It starts making defective replicating mining robots that eventually evolve into a medieval robot society.
Can't believe I'm the first to mention it, but I'm probably just old.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Mostly random stuff.
Possible. I think unlikely, but certainly possible. By your comment I take you to mean that designing such a payload is difficult if not impossible regardless of your technology level. I would counter-argue that life itself shows how such a system is at least theoretically possible. All that it's really missing is a much more effective error detection and elimination system. Otherwise life obviously self replicates, is extremely hardy, and can store/move a vast amount of information, more than enough to build itself and several subsequent generations of more advanced machines plus the instructions needed to drive it all.
That is not a rebuttal to what I said. How about offering something more pertinent? Are you suggesting there are no significant differences between living organisms and robots? Can you explain what makes a living organism different from a robot? I can describe huge numbers of differences, but I can't say why one is alive and the other isn't. But the differences have been apparent to humans since before we started writing stuff down. If we found the universe populated with machines, that would be the dominant technology in the universe, not the dominant life form.
A brain is a terrible thing to waste... Mind? That's debatable.
Far far away in a distant galaxies, robots utter their famous quotes.
Regards Slashdotgirl
The more I know, the less I know
Necron Army
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
I have come to regard this as basically religious, so this is somewhat like arguing about conservation of mass in transubstantiation, but I have a thick skin.
From what we know, carbon biologies last ~3 billion years or more, silicon biologies have so far 0 years behind them. Bayesians bet on carbon.
By the way, anyone who thinks that robotic / silicon life wouldn't be biological, and wouldn't evolve, doesn't understand evolution. Evolution is like entropy in that you can't get out of the game.
Sure extrapolation is always risky, seems a far better to bet than going with super intelligent robots that don't exist at all on the only planet we know that has life on it.
"Extrapolation" implies some sort of trend or data. You don't have a trend or even data; you have a single datum. On that basis, I don't think anything can really be said to be "a far better bet."
Then lets assumed complex life did evolve on a planet... what if it's a ocean planet and they're aquatic? They're never going to figure out electricity, they can't even experiment with it.
The superintelligent alien electric eel next to me has requested you amend your statement.
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
So the intelligent product of another form of intelligence is "artificial"? What if they created organic creatures with brains and hearts instead of cyborgs?
If so, I really hope the dominant life form is Number Six from BSG myself.
I, for one, welcome our frikkin' hot cylon overlords.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
Define "life"
Imagine a 3D printer that can print a 3D printer half it's size, then use until you achieve nanotechnology.
I think maybe these philosophers have not done enough LSD. What does artificial really mean in this context? Are clams artificial because enzymes make their shells from minerals found in the environment? A collection of "Lower" intelligent entities making larger more complex creatures with "higher" intelligence has been going on since the slime molds right? Here on earth robots will just be the enzymes within the larger connected organism of our planet. Differentiating between mostly carbon, and mostly...polymer, steel, copper, etc makes little sense.
Life on earth has been about one part of the earth turning other parts of the earth into more of itself. This boundary of Natural vs. Artificial sounds like something people are supposed to get over by at least grade 9 isn't it?
Yes, if you substitute one belief for another you greatly change the outcome of the extrapolation. "I beleive AI will never exist so that won't happen." Thanks for supporting my point that this sort of extrapolation is not science.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
If I were a robot, able to exist in a vacuum and needing no energy besides some self-contained nuclear power plant and/or (stellar) light, I don't think I'd be too interested in earth-like planets. It's much safer out in space: no rust or dust to speak of, no competing biological organisms, no volcanoes or planet-quakes, no cliffs to fall off of, no trees or rocks getting in my way when I want to go somewhere, no wind resistance, and no wars on planets where there is intelligent life. So if these robots exist, I would think they would just steer clear of inhabited planets, and maybe of all planets.
Only hard to us, at this point on time. That is not the case for all instances of life in the universe over the period of millions of years.
Take for example, Mars. I think we will find life there...
If we consider intelligence to be an imaginary concept, a word invented by people to explain their decision algorithms, then it raises some interesting questions about about what is possible in the universe.
Take your missile example, or anything you see around you - if intelligence does not exist, the molecules on this planet have been able to self-arrange into some fantastically complex structures, without an external interference. Even if "intelligence" does exist - our planet is a proof of a very generalized way of looking at what happened on this planet. Over enough time, molecules can self organize into very large intricate structures displaying such complex behaviour we call it intelligence. What if entire planets, or entire galaxies, were also already organized this way and challenge what we call "intelligence"?
There are stark differences in stability of an engineered product and product(animal or any other species) created via natural selection.
Engineered products almost always deteriorate when environment changes from the design parameters, often with a completely unplanned behavior.
Natural selection takes up long time to build its product . The product is well tested under a large set of environment conditions at a scale much much larger than an engineered product. After evolution has had long enough time to operate a natural evolved species will respond to any change in environment by changing its behavior in a nearly optimal direction.Further each production is kept a bit different from each other further reducing the risk of universal destruction to a any single random fluctuation.
Based on this an artificial species may although be able to defeat and destroy an intelligent naturally selected species, but after that it may itself deteriorate as soon as first few variations from its design parameters. Consider a solar storm, what good would a super intelligent software do if the processor itself is misbehaving, while at-least some humans are likely to survive.
Hence forgive me but i sure do not welcome artificial alien overloads, they are just a bubble.
People are motivated by feelings and urges. Without these the AI will do nothing it wasn't directly programmed for.
For example, even if it concludes people are a threat to it's existence it will do nothing, because it does not have the urge to self-preservation.
You're an idiot. Ultimately reductio-ad-absurdum if you create an atomically perfect simulation of a human brain then you are telling me that it will still not be conscious? Apply that logic in reverse and it merely proves that humans cannot be conscious either.. In reality you are a complete non-expert in the field and speaking from a deep well of ignorance.
Ironically part of the maths of Strong AI solves the imaginary mass calculation problem - proving that it is NOT impossible for massed objects to travel faster than light.. all it requires is a superposition of positive and negative mass that adds up to zero.
WHEN SOMEONE TELLS YOU SOMETHING IS IMPOSSIBLE BEYOND ALL DOUBT WITHOUT ANY PROOF TO BACK IT UP, THEY ARE USUALLY WRONG.
Below the speed of light Special Relativity is one of the most accurate theories in physics - above the speed of light..
I'm going to assume you have more, and a much better education than I do, and that you're just a little smarter than me (because I know how smart I am and the likelihood of anyone being smarter).
if you create an atomically perfect simulation of a human brain then you are telling me that it will still not be conscious?
Exactly. Let me make it clear. YES, THAT's WHAT I, AND PHILOSOPHERS OF MIND, AND COMPUTER SCIENTISTS (i.e. not "programmers" or "techies") ARE TELLING YOU.
I'm not going to give you citations. I'm only going to attempt to show you the petitio principii fallacy you're making, if you believe, and believe strongly, the opposite (which you obviously do, strongly, and think you can't possibly be wrong. But you are, sorry.).
You're assuming that mind is merely its physical constituents, and that synthetic duplication is possible for anything if even subatomic duplication were possible, when that isn't shown to be true. So really, that's two instances of the same fallacy. But first of all, there was this guy Heisenberg... etc... so your dreams of supreme technology are flawed. There's a limit to what will ever be possible, and what you propose, on its face, will never be possible (re: atomic-level duplication yada yada vapopsychoware and handwaving the existence human consciousness). And second of all, no matter how many subscribe to the computational theory of mind, it is flawed, and has been left behind by all serious academics about 20 years ago... including its strongest proponant, Putnam! We may someday figure out mind... but assuming we will do so by examing matter and whatever you throw at this... is a huge unknown. Then to assume its possible to duplicate mind... when we don't fully understand what mind/consciousness (externally) is... other than some weird effect of living brain.... again, is, upon the loose foundation that we may understand mind someday, to build this further belief that we can then synthtically create it... well... you're really a dreamer. A double-dreamer. That's good. But the limit, unfortunately, is that... StrongAI, true synthetic consciousness... not actually obtainable, again, unfortunately. Its analagous to magnets and coiled wire... and electricity... as mind/consciousness is an effect of living brain, so current is an effect of taking this stuff and moving it around in a certain way. The trouble is the living brain part... unless your simulator has some of that, its not going to get to consciousness... and if there is some real counterexample out there, of something dead, becoming alive.... I'd like to hear it. Once you get your head around Searle's Chinese Room, you realize its game over for the Reductionists, at least in "Mind," they're still pretty useful in Physics, Chemistry... etc.
The Admin and the Engineer
Somewhere there is a super intelligent robot making jokes about our 3D printer inadequacy and size...