From: Richard Loosemore (rpwl@lightlink.com)
Date: Sat Apr 29 2006 - 14:25:04 MDT
Mikko Särelä wrote:
> 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].
>
The way you put it at the end, I completely agree: there is a sense in
which this is still part of the "same" technology, but just a
dramatically (mind-bogglingly) faster one.
Richard Loosemore
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