poly: Our chances as Gaia's/God's ideas

>I still think my Gaia (from EARTH) is a good model. The SI is powerful,
>but it won't get rid of us. We are her thoughts.

Mmm. But there is that phrase from Popper, I think, "Letting our ideas
die in our steads." The idea being something like, we can evolve faster,
not by holding onto ideas as organisms hold onto their genes, dying or
surviving-to-reproduce with them, but by letting our ideas die or survive
and spread on their own... The funny thing is that until now I thought
of that as a model for long life without obsolescence. But in this
context it could be interpreted to mean that Gaia is more flexible if
She doesn't hold onto us too tightly.

In general, I think we can survive AI if
  1) As thoughts we are actually valuable, whether as ideas, skills,
     branches of alpha-beta trees, entertainments, curiosities, raw
     material for the subconscious, random number generators, or
     examples of autocatalytic sets of a certain size, AND,
  2) We can convince AIs of this in time AND,
  3) We can be converted to a form with a good benefit/cost ratio in
     time.

My guess is that step 2 is the hardest.

 --Steve

--
<sw@tiac.net> Steve Witham  The Pentium: Processaurus Rex