Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!nanotech From: autodesk!robertj@uunet.uu.net (Young Rob Jellinghaus) Newsgroups: sci.nanotech Subject: Re: Some problems of super-intelligence Message-ID: Date: 18 Dec 90 18:34:04 GMT Sender: nanotech@athos.rutgers.edu Organization: Autodesk, Inc., Sausalito, CA Lines: 37 Approved: nanotech@aramis.rutgers.edu In article landman@eng.sun.com (Howard A. Landman) writes: >One possibility is that >people would only use a small portion of their consciousness for dealing >with the snail-paced physical world, treating it like we do mowing the lawn. >The rest would be free to deal with other entities operating at their own >speed (computers and other enhanced humans). Myron Krueger, of Artificial Reality Corp., just gave a tech forum here at Autodesk. He's been working on interactive video/virtual reality-type systems for a good many years, and in a discussion of tactile feedback systems--telerobotics, for instance--you need a 1000 Hz feedback to be able to do very delicate types of fine work. Light can travel about 100 meters in 1/2000th of a second (it has to go to the other end & back). So there is a fairly low limit to how quickly you can process--soon, everyone else starts lagging way behind you! You know the delay when you're talking to someone a long way away by phone? Kind of distracting, right? Well, imagine that delay lengthened to several minutes, or a month, or a year.... Really high speed may be a pretty solitary place, which may come to think of it be an advantage. You want to think about something in privacy, you can--everyone else is prevented from reaching you by the speed of light! Yow! >At worst, it would be a fairly private existence with few disturbances. >Perfect for hacking. No kidding! > Howard A. Landman > landman@eng.sun.com -or- sun!landman -- Rob Jellinghaus | "Next time you see a lie being spread or Autodesk, Inc. | a bad decision being made out of sheer robertj@Autodesk.COM | ignorance, pause, and think of hypertext." {decwrl,uunet}!autodesk!robertj | -- K. Eric Drexler, _Engines of Creation_