From: Mikko Särelä (msarela@cc.hut.fi)
Date: Sat Apr 29 2006 - 10:36:08 MDT
On Sat, 29 Apr 2006, Richard Loosemore wrote:
> With the greatest of respect to you both, I have to say that you are not
> addressing the point that I made.
>
> Printing, PCs and the rest are just optimizations of human potential: yes,
> fantastic in the context of the first 500,000 years of our species, but all
> previous invention was done by human brains, and the impact on human brain
> creativity and productivity has been *relatively* (and I use the word with
> precision here) small compared to what would happen if the creative process
> were transferred to new kinds of minds that operated at speeds much greater
> than our own.
Yes, I thought about the same thing myself after writing the post. The way
that I would describe it is as follows.
There have been inventions that have helped get more out of the potential
that humans have for development. Some of them have helped terribly lot,
such as printing press and the internet. Still, there is a limit to the
pace of development when human brains are the sole inventors, because of
the physical limits on how fast we can learn and communicate ideas from
one person to another. All improvements in technology so far have only
pushed us closer to the physical limit.
Now for example AGI, or enhancing human intelligence propose to push that
limit a lot further and in that way they are truly different from anything
that has ever happened.
>From another view point they still are part of the same technology
development that quickens the pace and 'compare' to other great
inventions, even though they may end up quickening the pace far further
than any invention in human history. [Actually one could call the
'invention' of language a comparable 'invention', because it pushed the
limits of development far further than would have been possible without
it].
--
Mikko Särelä http://thoughtsfromid.blogspot.com/
"Happiness is not a destination, but a way of travelling." Aristotle
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