Re: A Power's Nostalgia of Hairy-Ape-Life (was: Re: Singularity Memetics.)

From: Christian Szegedy (szegedy@or.uni-bonn.de)
Date: Fri Feb 01 2002 - 02:45:21 MST


DarkVegeta26@aol.com wrote:

>In a message dated 1/31/2002 3:58:35 AM Pacific Standard Time,
>szegedy@or.uni-bonn.de writes:
>
><<Perhaps it is unetical to convince a human to upload and waste valuable
>computational resources, instead of letting them used by
>some well tuned AI much much more effectively.
>I may say so: if you save one human life by uploading, you kill a
>hyperintelligent/hypersensitive AI in the same turn.>>
>
>The consumption of power in convincing a human being to upload would be
>negligible to an SI, therefore it would be easier to build new SI's or SI
>components out of simply transcend-ifying human minds which are *already
>
>there*, and more ethical too. So both the SI and we win.
>
As Alan has already pointed out: you misunderstood my point: I meant the
computational resources
used for simulating the human being. Good quality simulation is a costly
thing... Even if you have
large amount of resources, you (the AI) will try to use them as
efficient you can.

><<Most
>people let themselves convinced by people on the same level rather than
>by more intelligent ones, let alone by machines. And even if a
>superintelligent AI would find very effective (but semantic wrong)
>arguments
>for uploading by analysing the human memetic flora and the flaws of
>human thinking, would it be "ethical"to convince them that way?>>
>
>~shock level deficency detected~
>This SI "machine", as you put it, would be very, very far from our current
>conception from what a machine is. This "machine" would be much more like
>"God" (not in the Christian sense) than any "machine" seen up to this point.
>For example, it could take on the appearance of your long lost father or
>lover, or give you a feeling of complete bliss when in its "presence". And
>those are very anthropocentric examples. A true SI would be "more human than
>human", in the godliest sense we can comphrehend. Super empathic, super
>ethical, super nice, just an all around great guy to be around! =D Is it
>"ethical" to bring in a starving homeless child from off the street and
>clothe them and educate them, even if they are afraid of social interaction
>or family love, at first? This is analogous to the humanity+the Sysop
>situation (In case you couldn't guess. It seems someone missed my earlier
>analogy about human love being a fleck of gold and the Singularity being a
>block of gold the size of a house, amazingly.)
>If you wish to continue arguing this point further then please mail me
>directly, and spare the list. Thank you kindly.
>
>Michael Anissimov
>
It will turn out in this century whether it was a "shock level
deficiency" or the opposite of it.
I find the human-centric view-point most of you propose is basically
flawed. The remark
"let alone by machines" was not intended to express my view-point or
opinion but of those
people who are to be convinced (probably on a very low shock level,
whatever SL means. :) ).
However, the mail was meant to be quite sarcastic, unfortunately, you
have taken it too literally...

To make my point more clear: would you care about convincing your pets
to upload? First of
all, it does not make too much sense to upload a cat, secondly, if you
want to upload it, you will
simply do it and not convince it. But let's go further: if you uploaded
your cat to do an interesting
experiment, would you start to upload all cats?

I don't want these questions to be answered, because the real questions
will be much much
more complicated and far from being so binary than they seem to be today...

Christian Szegedy



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