Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!nanotech From: peter@prefect.berkeley.edu (Peter Moore) Newsgroups: sci.nanotech Subject: Re: Some problems of super-intelligence Message-ID: Date: 20 Dec 90 19:31:07 GMT Sender: nanotech@athos.rutgers.edu Organization: Objectivity Inc. Lines: 31 Approved: nanotech@aramis.rutgers.edu I can't help think everyone is missing something here. I would think that any significant increase in thought speed would have to involve essentially all computation/mentation taking place in hardware. If any part of the process dropped down to wetware, you would have an incredible bottleneck. So a thought-accelerator would for all intent and purpose have to be an artificial conciousness. You might supply the initial state and configuration, but once it started it would be a clone of you. There would be no reason, other than specific design, for it to stop thinking once the wetware was disconnected. Unless you believe in a un-physical soul that had to be contributed by wetware to be able to think, you are just making a clone of yourself. You would be obsoleting yourself, not enhancing yourself. (I can't help thinking of a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon where Calvin clones himself so the clone can do his homework while the original goes out to play. Of course the clone, being an exact clone of Calvin, want no more to do with the homework than the original.) Peter Moore a old, slow appendix on a shiny new machine. [You could (a) do the Moravec trick of replacing a few neurons at a time, maintaining continuous consciousness throughout; (b) assume it works and do a destructive analysis of youir brain to do the copying; (c) if non-destructive copying is possible, do it and just wait until the old body dies. Personally, I would guess that people would begin by augmenting their existing brains and replacing parts they didn't consider "personal" (autonomic system, etc) and ultimately replacing the whole thing part by part. --JoSH]