Peter C. McCluskey wrote:
> You think it's possible to abandon evolution without enormous
> opportunity costs? I suspect I'd prefer most versions of the "burning
> the cosmos" scenario.
In the singleton scenario, evolution would not be abandoned; it would
be internalized. Instead of natural selection there would be
deliberate design of the fitness function and the selection
mechanisms. It would be more like a researcher playing with genetic
algorithms. (It would even be possible to retain a considerable
extent of "natural" selection within the singleton.)
> With the side effect of making them more vulnerable to life that
> originated elsewhere and didn't outlaw evolution.
> I suspect that outlawing memetic evolution effectively enough to
> achieve this singleton would severely limit the intelligence that
> could be achieved.
I think that for the foreseeable future the risk that we will
annihilate ourselves is much greater than that we will be annihilated
by aliens. As regards long-term strategies, they will in many
respects be similar to the best we could hope for without the
singleton: e.g. the singleton would want to expand in all directions
at near the max feasible speed.
As I said, I don't think that the singleton would outlaw memetic
evolution. For instance, it could even use some of its resources to
simulate a totally ruthless assembly of egotists, adventurers, and
crazy professors in a life-and-death battle against each other. A
superintelligence could then safely extract whatever valuable memetic
stuff resulted from the simulation.
_____________________________________________________
Nick Bostrom
Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method
London School of Economics
n.bostrom@lse.ac.uk
http://www.hedweb.com/nickb
Received on Sun Apr 26 23:48:21 1998
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