Re: How hard a Singularity?

From: Eugen Leitl (eugen@leitl.org)
Date: Sun Jun 23 2002 - 03:37:43 MDT


On Sat, 22 Jun 2002, Michael Roy Ames wrote:

> Yeah... I have no solid intuition about the take-off acceleration
> factor. I can only imagine what I would do if I had access to my own
> mental programming. I have many, many ideas about this, as I have

You seem to somehow assume you can understand it. Here's your DNA sequence
on a CDROM. Please give me the diffs necessary to give you four arms and
gills, and a neocortex twice your current size. (Hey, sometimes size does
matter).

> been thinking about "what I'm gonna do after I upload" for a long time

Okay, you're uploaded. I'm giving you full r/w access to /dev/mem (which
is a very large bitvector and about every bit flips on microsecond scale)
and the full GNU tool suite. Do your worst.

Sure, that was unfair. Wait, here's your 3d voxelset image describing your
brain at ultrastructure scale with full dynamics. For all practical
purposes you can assume a 1:1 mapping to physics (transmembrane gradient,
ion gating action, diffusion, genome network, protein interaction matrix,
etc). The toolbox you're given involves zooming, complete r/w access to
the 3d array, etc.

What are you going to do with this? How long do you think you need to
build the tools to analyze this, and how many virtually drooling idiots
are going to document your failures in self engineering?

> now. First on my list is: Make a backup copy. Second: Work on

A static copy doesn't do very well if you've managed to screw yourself up
during fancy neurosurgery. What you need is periodically dumping state,
and periodic reactivation of your former state, with voting rights on
whether to make the new diff permanent.

> getting smarter for a while (not a really long time) then stop and
> reassess the situation.



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jul 17 2013 - 04:00:39 MDT