Well, that's a hypothesis that fits the evidence. But another hypothesis, beyond saying "we we don't even known what natural intelligence is" would be "we know what natural intelligence is, but it involves about 1000 interacting subsystems in a human brain many of which we don't yet know how to duplicate"
Modern neuroscience has surprisingly cogent explanations how it all works together, the trouble is that many of the tricks the brain does would be very tough to duplicate with current technology. For example, the feedback systems that make it all work are tied to a biological body via a network of molecular sensors. We don't have hardware remotely comparable to that as of yet.
The complexity is also immense, and it's wired together in such a way that all the systems are interrelated. Even if the world's fastest supercomputer could simulate a human sized network efficiently (it can't...not because the brain is so powerful but more because simulations using current cpus are hideously inefficient) we don't have more than a tiny fragment of the neural map that such a simulation would need to function.
So it's not really a total mystery like the general opinion here is on slashdot...but a very complex problem that would take immense resources and many years to solve. Well, there isn't very much money spent on AI research. Certainly not the hundreds of billions of dollars/year that "common sense" would dictate that we should be spending. (because even partially working AI could save millions of human lives every year and massively increase human productivity, and fully functioning AI would allow us to unleash a golden age of technological development never before seen on earth)
Because he would investigate every scene, and ALWAYS say it was arson. Because there was no statistical or numerical way to show if a particular burnt patch ACTUALLY was arson, beyond a reasonable doubt. Because the supreme court bitchslapped it down, after the state of Texas murdered the man, and they released several other prisoners sent to prison for the same reason.
Perhaps I should have said at very high COSTS. Fuel may be cheap, but the opportunity cost of a 1 hour commute to work (each way! every day!) is enormous.
I didn't say they were superior. They are following a different R strategy which is why they have higher intelligence on average, smaller physical size, longer maturation periods, less sex, and take lower risks. These are all known facts that are both backed up by hundreds of studies and are fucking obvious.
Mother nature determines who is superior, and obviously intelligence is only one factor.
Are you in a European country? Can you emmigrate to one? You don't want none of this. Those high salary numbers in the USA are not as good as they look on paper. Assuming you've got a white collar job, you do know that in USA we live in overcrowded cities and are forced to commute long distances at very high fuel prices in private automobiles because we consider good public transportation to be immoral. We imprison more people than anywhere else on the globe, so pray you don't have bad luck and look suspicious because a 'jury of your peers' is means squat. Oh, and 2/3 of us are fatasses and if your wife is hot every richer man here will be trying to steal her from you. Don't believe the crap spewed out by hollywood, that stuff is almost as distorted a view of reality as North Korean propoganda in terms of how the average person lives.
(reason salaries are misleading is because our medical system eats 20% of every dollar anyone produces anywhere, and a bigger chunk is taken from the middle class. And our legal system devours another huge chunk, we need more lawyers than any other country in the world yet injustices are the norm. Oh and we have blown a vast amount of treasure fighting wars that earned us nothing)
That's 20 million people. All of whom come from countries that are worse off than the USA, for some reason. Has it ever occurred to you that perhaps the reason the USA has done well (and these countries did so poorly) has at least SOMETHING to do with BOTH the genetics AND the ideas of the people who live in the USA?
So if you dilute the population with a flood of people who come from less successful countries, what would you EXPECT from a rational, reasonable view to happen?
Yes, I used the forbidden word - genetics. However, there is no biologist out there with any credibility who can simply say that human ideas and mental performance and behavior are divorced from our genes. If we let the 'brown people' in, who somehow for some coincidence almost always come from third world countries, we too will end up like the brown people.
And one final comment before you call me a racist in your replies : the best evidence available shows that Asians have the greatest intelligence on average of any race of people. NOT white people, who are in the middle. One possible reason for white people's extraordinary success in past centuries is that their languages (english and related structures) make their mental 'software' more flexible than rigid asian languages where a new character must be introduced for a new idea to be communicated on paper.
This is why, in the present day, Asians who learned English in childhood have extraordinary success in science and R&D.
The only impressive thing here is that the judge (or his aides) apparently cracked open a dictionary or maybe even a math textbook to get a basic idea of what "random" means. Unfortunately, the judiciary doesn't always rule on the basis of absolute mathematical or scientific fact, when it is relevant to the case. For example, in the arson trial of a Texas man who supposedly (for no credible reason) murdered his wife and children they brought in arson 'experts' who had no scientific validity to their process at all. A Texas arson expert looks at some char marks and somehow always (whenever it is a criminal investigation) concludes "it's arson". Despite the improbability of every fire said 'expert' examines during his career being caused by a crime.
Mods add the smaller parts. Industrial Craft adds electricity, Integrated Circuits adds logic gates, Buildcraft adds automated resource handling, Planes adds airplanes and the player skills needed to fly them, and so forth. Minecraft as it is sold from Mojang is basically like buying a starter kit of basic legos without any of the really specialized stuff.
As soon as the next version is released, it will be much, much easier to add mods and keep them working as the game is updated. This is because Notch has decided to stop "hiding" his legos from us, which prevents us from being able to easily see what he is doing and build on it.
There's a mod that fixes that problem. It's called survival craft, and all it does is :
1. Creepers (the green monsters) will explode if they cannot get to you. So they will go to the wall of your house and THEN they blow up, blowing a hole.
2. Zombies and spiders can DIG through dirt, sand, cloth, wood, etc. (anything not extremely hard to dig through). They will break anything they can dig through in order to get to you and pwn you.
3. Monsters pathfind much better and can usually find a way to get to you.
Possibly...but for instance SILVER has basically the same advantages that gold has, but it was decided not to base currencies off of it. It's possible that if BT were ever big enough, 'lock in' would cause people to use it for a long time. Gold, despite the deflationary problems it has, remained the official support of currencies for centuries. It did work, although possibly not as well as today's 'fiat' currencies.
And the big advantages of bitcoins? Let's go over the advantages, shall we : (advantages list taken from another post) You can send them in any amount to anyone on the internet, and with almost no fees.
- International drug lords can be paid from anywhere
Your customer base is therefore the entire world not just people with your "coin of the realm" -makes it easy to launder that drug money
If a customer pays you the money it's yours they can petition or sue you for a refund, but they can not issue an automatic charge back. -very helpful for someone selling illegal goods
No third parties are involved, there is no one else to trust or pay fees too. -a HUGE advantage for illegal goods transactions
You needn't hold bitcoins, there are a number of markets, as well as real world people who can change your bitcoins to cash in moments. -Can cash out that money the moment it is convenient
Transactions happen very quickly compared to wire transfers, checks, paypal and credit cards. -great for street corner dealing!
It is as easy to accept bitcoins as it is to spend them, unlike credit cards. -ditto
They are very portable. While it would be difficult to travel with more then 10 thousands dollars of anything, you could easily hold millions of dollars on a micro SD. -This is HUGE. The current drug currency of choice, the $20 and $100 bill have a massive problem : over the years, as deflation has occurred, you need more and more of it to represent a significant amount of money. A large drug business needs to move huge amounts of currency around, and micro SDs (that can be BACKED UP) are perfect. Even better, you can send huge sums of money around the world just by
Downsides : transactions are not anonymous, even though the identities of the parties are. A large drug business would be forced to use cutouts - people who act like hubs, conducting large numbers of transactions between bitcoins and real world currency (it need not be physical) and then back again. These people would not keep records of their transactions and would be based in 'liberal' jurisdictions in the world where the authorities don't give a shit.
All the arguments above also apply perfectly to the other 2 major vices - gambling and hookers. Bitcoins are a perfect way to do internet gambling, secure from the moralizing of the big credit card processors. You could do transactions with your bookie safely and securely. Hookers, same thing.
This part bugs me. I'm considering mining for a little coin, hoping I can at least pay back the cost of the hardware. But the big reason to go to BTs for people is to do transactions that can't be reversed and have no fees.
Do you mean people killed by hitler during the genocides or do you mean the total deaths caused by Hitler's forces during the war? One number is drastically higher than another.
Bank isn't going to have 5 million on hand unless it's a bank that has tons of guards that someone won't get past without multiple robbers and real guns. (and someone could easily get killed in the process, making the likely penalty decades or life in prison for any robber who gets caught)
That last part isn't always true. Allowing illnesses to become emergencies ends up with patients dying, which is cheaper in the long run. If a person actually has a lifestyle in line with the 'ideal' healthy lifestyle, with a low body weight and a low stress lifestyle with lots of fruits and vegetables and so on they live longer on average. So long, that when they finally do get ill, it's some extremely expensive thing to treat like metastatic cancer or dementia that always eventually results in death.
Right, but cars do work very well for the majority of this country's 300 million population. Only a small fraction have to live in the overcrowded metroxplexes that do not have adequate road systems for their populations.
Ever tried driving a car in say, Lubbock, Texas? It works AMAZINGLY well. You can get anywhere in the city you want in 15 minutes, and delays are minimal.
You can just click on the program's entry in the taskbar to minimize, and double click the title bar to min/maximize. You don't need either of those UI elements anyway.
Cells and enzymes are limited by legacy cruft. Evolution cannot do certain things, it is not a very efficient or speedy problem solving algorithm. It tends to find local maxima and then stop. Study evolution and you'll find out what I mean.
Jupiter would obviously be close to last on the list, but deconstructing it is possible. By the time we got to jupiter, we would have solar collector arrays with many times the surface area of planets. (because if you converted smaller planets into a millimeter thick solar collector array it would be very large). Perhaps there would be floating structures in jupiter's atmosphere that would convert the gas to solids through chemistry and fire it back up into orbit with electromag accelerators. Or other ways, it really isn't an issue if you have this kind of energy supply and millions of times human intelligence. You would be able to come up with optimal designs based on all your knowledge in probably fractions of a second for your machinery to deconstruct jupiter. As things go wrong, you would be able to redesign your equipment based upon what went wrong. This is because a fraction of a second would be thousands of years of human thought...as if you had a team of the world's best engineers working on the problem the entire time.
I know this because the human brain is very slow, and certain elements of the way it functions could be drastically accelerated. (that is, there are certain things the brain does that we KNOW for CERTAIN are very slow and could be millions of times faster. We don't know everything about neurons, but we do know, for instance, that action potentials traveling on axons do not carry any other information than timing data, and travel too slowly. The reason we know this is because we know the laws of physics fairly well. I'm trying to head off your obvious argument, that neuroscientists are too ignorant about the brain to conclude anything at all)
We have vast amounts of wealth, most of it we fritter on wars and entertainment. If energy prices went up 10 times, and our very survival was an issue, things would change very rapidly. Simple economics would dictate that...saving energy and batteries and a grid overhaul would all be cost effective if energy was expensive. Look at what happened during WW2 : the Axis powers developed novel methods to replace oil in a FEW YEARS WHILE BEING BOMBED. This is because they were desperate.
We have a gigantic reservoir of coal, among other things, that we could use in an emergency if there was no other options. Supposedly, there are centuries worth of coal left.
Obviously. But the LIMIT on the singularity is arbitrary control over matter, and access to all matter that you have the energy to process. That is, at the minimum (this is using what we know today, not what we would know if we were millions of times more intelligent) you would be able to put all of the solid matter in our solar system (all the planets, all the asteroids, jupiter, the moons, etc) to productive use. (as in, convert it to robots or more computronium or use the elements you don't have a use for as fission or fusion fuel).
"computronium" is based on this limit. It's essentially the fastest possible computer you can build per gram of matter (computronium would reconfigure itself depending on what problems it is solving). We would convert a lot of the matter in this solar system to computronium (and the solar collectors to power it). This would enable us to build colossal virtual realities and to expand ourselves into beings far smarter and more capable than we are now.
All of these are based on pretty reasonable assumptions. We already have machines that exist today that can use most elements and create more instances of themselves, if supplied with enough energy and a huge network of these machines, all tended by human beings. (I mean our current infrastructure : our steel mills, our factories, etc). We can already automate most of this equipment using known software techniques, it just hasn't been economically feasible to automate a lot of it. (easier to pay people in China/India etc)
If we had artificial intelligence that was as capable as the human beings we use now, we could automate all of it easily, including the design of new machines.
This is the 'clanking replicator + strong AI' singularity scenario. It seems pretty much unavoidable, eventually, EXCEPT
Well, why don't we just miniaturize our STM microscopes into machines that can systematically pick and place individual atomic intermediates, allowing us to create most arbitrary molecular structures? These machines would themselves be very small and would self replicate by manufacturing copies of themselves. Instead of needing acres of factories to reproduce, a machine able to copy itself and make nearly anything that was a frozen solid would fit in a briefcase.
We could use machines like these to take apart frozen human volunteers and steal the "software" of human intelligence straight from the molecular patterns of the human brain. This would give us strong AI, plus self replicating machinery...ALSO leading extremely rapidly to the singularity.
That's ridiculous. Every atom (except for helium) we ever used in our civilization is still on this planet, somewhere. We get more energy falling for free on the planet every day than we have ever used. If we can't figure out a way to solve our problems given these resources, we deserve our fates.
Because we have prototypes of this kind of life, and they work. (I am talking about the combined efforts of existing human beings and factories). Because anyone who builds high end versions of this would have an unbeatable economic and military advantage. Because once various examples of this kind of life exist, the ones that freely replicate to use all of the available resources will overwhelm the ones who do not.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, that's a hypothesis that fits the evidence. But another hypothesis, beyond saying "we we don't even known what natural intelligence is" would be "we know what natural intelligence is, but it involves about 1000 interacting subsystems in a human brain many of which we don't yet know how to duplicate"
Modern neuroscience has surprisingly cogent explanations how it all works together, the trouble is that many of the tricks the brain does would be very tough to duplicate with current technology. For example, the feedback systems that make it all work are tied to a biological body via a network of molecular sensors. We don't have hardware remotely comparable to that as of yet.
The complexity is also immense, and it's wired together in such a way that all the systems are interrelated. Even if the world's fastest supercomputer could simulate a human sized network efficiently (it can't...not because the brain is so powerful but more because simulations using current cpus are hideously inefficient) we don't have more than a tiny fragment of the neural map that such a simulation would need to function.
So it's not really a total mystery like the general opinion here is on slashdot...but a very complex problem that would take immense resources and many years to solve. Well, there isn't very much money spent on AI research. Certainly not the hundreds of billions of dollars/year that "common sense" would dictate that we should be spending. (because even partially working AI could save millions of human lives every year and massively increase human productivity, and fully functioning AI would allow us to unleash a golden age of technological development never before seen on earth)
Because he would investigate every scene, and ALWAYS say it was arson. Because there was no statistical or numerical way to show if a particular burnt patch ACTUALLY was arson, beyond a reasonable doubt. Because the supreme court bitchslapped it down, after the state of Texas murdered the man, and they released several other prisoners sent to prison for the same reason.
Why wouldn't it? There's whole journals on this subject, and no matter which way the data is massaged there's still differences.
Perhaps I should have said at very high COSTS. Fuel may be cheap, but the opportunity cost of a 1 hour commute to work (each way! every day!) is enormous.
What is race but a different basket of genes? You, sir, need to actually study biology rather than parroting politically correct bullshit.
I didn't say they were superior. They are following a different R strategy which is why they have higher intelligence on average, smaller physical size, longer maturation periods, less sex, and take lower risks. These are all known facts that are both backed up by hundreds of studies and are fucking obvious.
Mother nature determines who is superior, and obviously intelligence is only one factor.
A racist is someone who makes up shit for an agenda. Actual facts, shown by hundreds of studies, backs up my statement.
Are you in a European country? Can you emmigrate to one? You don't want none of this. Those high salary numbers in the USA are not as good as they look on paper. Assuming you've got a white collar job, you do know that in USA we live in overcrowded cities and are forced to commute long distances at very high fuel prices in private automobiles because we consider good public transportation to be immoral. We imprison more people than anywhere else on the globe, so pray you don't have bad luck and look suspicious because a 'jury of your peers' is means squat. Oh, and 2/3 of us are fatasses and if your wife is hot every richer man here will be trying to steal her from you. Don't believe the crap spewed out by hollywood, that stuff is almost as distorted a view of reality as North Korean propoganda in terms of how the average person lives.
(reason salaries are misleading is because our medical system eats 20% of every dollar anyone produces anywhere, and a bigger chunk is taken from the middle class. And our legal system devours another huge chunk, we need more lawyers than any other country in the world yet injustices are the norm. Oh and we have blown a vast amount of treasure fighting wars that earned us nothing)
That's 20 million people. All of whom come from countries that are worse off than the USA, for some reason. Has it ever occurred to you that perhaps the reason the USA has done well (and these countries did so poorly) has at least SOMETHING to do with BOTH the genetics AND the ideas of the people who live in the USA?
So if you dilute the population with a flood of people who come from less successful countries, what would you EXPECT from a rational, reasonable view to happen?
Yes, I used the forbidden word - genetics. However, there is no biologist out there with any credibility who can simply say that human ideas and mental performance and behavior are divorced from our genes. If we let the 'brown people' in, who somehow for some coincidence almost always come from third world countries, we too will end up like the brown people.
And one final comment before you call me a racist in your replies : the best evidence available shows that Asians have the greatest intelligence on average of any race of people. NOT white people, who are in the middle. One possible reason for white people's extraordinary success in past centuries is that their languages (english and related structures) make their mental 'software' more flexible than rigid asian languages where a new character must be introduced for a new idea to be communicated on paper.
This is why, in the present day, Asians who learned English in childhood have extraordinary success in science and R&D.
And also, note that I am not Asian.
The only impressive thing here is that the judge (or his aides) apparently cracked open a dictionary or maybe even a math textbook to get a basic idea of what "random" means. Unfortunately, the judiciary doesn't always rule on the basis of absolute mathematical or scientific fact, when it is relevant to the case. For example, in the arson trial of a Texas man who supposedly (for no credible reason) murdered his wife and children they brought in arson 'experts' who had no scientific validity to their process at all. A Texas arson expert looks at some char marks and somehow always (whenever it is a criminal investigation) concludes "it's arson". Despite the improbability of every fire said 'expert' examines during his career being caused by a crime.
Mods add the smaller parts. Industrial Craft adds electricity, Integrated Circuits adds logic gates, Buildcraft adds automated resource handling, Planes adds airplanes and the player skills needed to fly them, and so forth. Minecraft as it is sold from Mojang is basically like buying a starter kit of basic legos without any of the really specialized stuff.
As soon as the next version is released, it will be much, much easier to add mods and keep them working as the game is updated. This is because Notch has decided to stop "hiding" his legos from us, which prevents us from being able to easily see what he is doing and build on it.
There's a mod that fixes that problem. It's called survival craft, and all it does is :
1. Creepers (the green monsters) will explode if they cannot get to you. So they will go to the wall of your house and THEN they blow up, blowing a hole.
2. Zombies and spiders can DIG through dirt, sand, cloth, wood, etc. (anything not extremely hard to dig through). They will break anything they can dig through in order to get to you and pwn you.
3. Monsters pathfind much better and can usually find a way to get to you.
Possibly...but for instance SILVER has basically the same advantages that gold has, but it was decided not to base currencies off of it. It's possible that if BT were ever big enough, 'lock in' would cause people to use it for a long time. Gold, despite the deflationary problems it has, remained the official support of currencies for centuries. It did work, although possibly not as well as today's 'fiat' currencies.
Actually, there's something else you can buy : http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/06/silkroad/
And the big advantages of bitcoins? Let's go over the advantages, shall we :
(advantages list taken from another post)
You can send them in any amount to anyone on the internet, and with almost no fees.
- International drug lords can be paid from anywhere
Your customer base is therefore the entire world not just people with your "coin of the realm"
-makes it easy to launder that drug money
If a customer pays you the money it's yours they can petition or sue you for a refund, but they can not issue an automatic charge back.
-very helpful for someone selling illegal goods
No third parties are involved, there is no one else to trust or pay fees too.
-a HUGE advantage for illegal goods transactions
You needn't hold bitcoins, there are a number of markets, as well as real world people who can change your bitcoins to cash in moments.
-Can cash out that money the moment it is convenient
Transactions happen very quickly compared to wire transfers, checks, paypal and credit cards.
-great for street corner dealing!
It is as easy to accept bitcoins as it is to spend them, unlike credit cards.
-ditto
They are very portable. While it would be difficult to travel with more then 10 thousands dollars of anything, you could easily hold millions of dollars on a micro SD.
-This is HUGE. The current drug currency of choice, the $20 and $100 bill have a massive problem : over the years, as deflation has occurred, you need more and more of it to represent a significant amount of money. A large drug business needs to move huge amounts of currency around, and micro SDs (that can be BACKED UP) are perfect. Even better, you can send huge sums of money around the world just by
Downsides : transactions are not anonymous, even though the identities of the parties are. A large drug business would be forced to use cutouts - people who act like hubs, conducting large numbers of transactions between bitcoins and real world currency (it need not be physical) and then back again. These people would not keep records of their transactions and would be based in 'liberal' jurisdictions in the world where the authorities don't give a shit.
All the arguments above also apply perfectly to the other 2 major vices - gambling and hookers. Bitcoins are a perfect way to do internet gambling, secure from the moralizing of the big credit card processors. You could do transactions with your bookie safely and securely. Hookers, same thing.
This part bugs me. I'm considering mining for a little coin, hoping I can at least pay back the cost of the hardware. But the big reason to go to BTs for people is to do transactions that can't be reversed and have no fees.
Citation needed.
Do you mean people killed by hitler during the genocides or do you mean the total deaths caused by Hitler's forces during the war? One number is drastically higher than another.
Bank isn't going to have 5 million on hand unless it's a bank that has tons of guards that someone won't get past without multiple robbers and real guns. (and someone could easily get killed in the process, making the likely penalty decades or life in prison for any robber who gets caught)
That last part isn't always true. Allowing illnesses to become emergencies ends up with patients dying, which is cheaper in the long run. If a person actually has a lifestyle in line with the 'ideal' healthy lifestyle, with a low body weight and a low stress lifestyle with lots of fruits and vegetables and so on they live longer on average. So long, that when they finally do get ill, it's some extremely expensive thing to treat like metastatic cancer or dementia that always eventually results in death.
Right, but cars do work very well for the majority of this country's 300 million population. Only a small fraction have to live in the overcrowded metroxplexes that do not have adequate road systems for their populations.
Ever tried driving a car in say, Lubbock, Texas? It works AMAZINGLY well. You can get anywhere in the city you want in 15 minutes, and delays are minimal.
You can just click on the program's entry in the taskbar to minimize, and double click the title bar to min/maximize. You don't need either of those UI elements anyway.
The reason for this is abortion.
Cells and enzymes are limited by legacy cruft. Evolution cannot do certain things, it is not a very efficient or speedy problem solving algorithm. It tends to find local maxima and then stop. Study evolution and you'll find out what I mean.
Jupiter would obviously be close to last on the list, but deconstructing it is possible. By the time we got to jupiter, we would have solar collector arrays with many times the surface area of planets. (because if you converted smaller planets into a millimeter thick solar collector array it would be very large). Perhaps there would be floating structures in jupiter's atmosphere that would convert the gas to solids through chemistry and fire it back up into orbit with electromag accelerators. Or other ways, it really isn't an issue if you have this kind of energy supply and millions of times human intelligence. You would be able to come up with optimal designs based on all your knowledge in probably fractions of a second for your machinery to deconstruct jupiter. As things go wrong, you would be able to redesign your equipment based upon what went wrong. This is because a fraction of a second would be thousands of years of human thought...as if you had a team of the world's best engineers working on the problem the entire time.
I know this because the human brain is very slow, and certain elements of the way it functions could be drastically accelerated. (that is, there are certain things the brain does that we KNOW for CERTAIN are very slow and could be millions of times faster. We don't know everything about neurons, but we do know, for instance, that action potentials traveling on axons do not carry any other information than timing data, and travel too slowly. The reason we know this is because we know the laws of physics fairly well. I'm trying to head off your obvious argument, that neuroscientists are too ignorant about the brain to conclude anything at all)
We have vast amounts of wealth, most of it we fritter on wars and entertainment. If energy prices went up 10 times, and our very survival was an issue, things would change very rapidly. Simple economics would dictate that...saving energy and batteries and a grid overhaul would all be cost effective if energy was expensive. Look at what happened during WW2 : the Axis powers developed novel methods to replace oil in a FEW YEARS WHILE BEING BOMBED.
This is because they were desperate.
We have a gigantic reservoir of coal, among other things, that we could use in an emergency if there was no other options. Supposedly, there are centuries worth of coal left.
Obviously. But the LIMIT on the singularity is arbitrary control over matter, and access to all matter that you have the energy to process. That is, at the minimum (this is using what we know today, not what we would know if we were millions of times more intelligent) you would be able to put all of the solid matter in our solar system (all the planets, all the asteroids, jupiter, the moons, etc) to productive use. (as in, convert it to robots or more computronium or use the elements you don't have a use for as fission or fusion fuel).
"computronium" is based on this limit. It's essentially the fastest possible computer you can build per gram of matter (computronium would reconfigure itself depending on what problems it is solving). We would convert a lot of the matter in this solar system to computronium (and the solar collectors to power it). This would enable us to build colossal virtual realities and to expand ourselves into beings far smarter and more capable than we are now.
All of these are based on pretty reasonable assumptions. We already have machines that exist today that can use most elements and create more instances of themselves, if supplied with enough energy and a huge network of these machines, all tended by human beings. (I mean our current infrastructure : our steel mills, our factories, etc). We can already automate most of this equipment using known software techniques, it just hasn't been economically feasible to automate a lot of it. (easier to pay people in China/India etc)
If we had artificial intelligence that was as capable as the human beings we use now, we could automate all of it easily, including the design of new machines.
This is the 'clanking replicator + strong AI' singularity scenario. It seems pretty much unavoidable, eventually, EXCEPT
Well, why don't we just miniaturize our STM microscopes into machines that can systematically pick and place individual atomic intermediates, allowing us to create most arbitrary molecular structures? These machines would themselves be very small and would self replicate by manufacturing copies of themselves. Instead of needing acres of factories to reproduce, a machine able to copy itself and make nearly anything that was a frozen solid would fit in a briefcase.
We could use machines like these to take apart frozen human volunteers and steal the "software" of human intelligence straight from the molecular patterns of the human brain. This would give us strong AI, plus self replicating machinery...ALSO leading extremely rapidly to the singularity.
That's ridiculous. Every atom (except for helium) we ever used in our civilization is still on this planet, somewhere. We get more energy falling for free on the planet every day than we have ever used. If we can't figure out a way to solve our problems given these resources, we deserve our fates.
Because we have prototypes of this kind of life, and they work. (I am talking about the combined efforts of existing human beings and factories). Because anyone who builds high end versions of this would have an unbeatable economic and military advantage. Because once various examples of this kind of life exist, the ones that freely replicate to use all of the available resources will overwhelm the ones who do not.