From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Wed Feb 06 2002 - 13:49:39 MST
polysync@pobox.com wrote:
>
> I assume some will still be around to
> upload, and not necessarily to the same Sysop you decide to visit.
A "Sysop" is universal within human space, although it's possible that it
may encounter aliens with other arrangements. A set of multiple
interacting communities, each of which has root access to reality, is a
"polis" scenario (named after the polises in _Diaspora_). Egan never did
quite explain why no polis ever made war on any other, and why nobody in
any polis ever decides to violate the rights of simulated sentients, and
how it is that all human space wound up with an apparently unenforced yet
never-once-broken taboo against exponential reproduction, but I suppose he
can be forgiven all that, since it wasn't the point of his book.
Certainly such a rosy scenario is not realistic for the ~human
intelligences that inhabited Diaspora; it might happen with transhumans.
Incidentally, a Sysop is not universal "by definition" but because it
descends from, or was constructed by, a singleton superintelligence with
no local competitors, the result of a hard takeoff. Such a singleton SI
need not construct a singleton Sysop, but it would have the option.
-- -- -- -- --
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://intelligence.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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