4 ms·

Humanity is also immortal and self-modifying, it uses human bodies as the unit of program transfer and modification. Humanity's version is extremely slow, of co

by knughit 11y ago

Humanity is also immortal and self-modifying, it uses human bodies as the unit of program transfer and modification. Humanity's version is extremely slow, of course, and limited in quantity and quality of copies of a good program.

TeMPOraL 11y ago
Indeed. And see how far we've managed to get after we've figured out a good way to pass learned knowledge around.
- otakucode 11y ago
  To be fair, we do have quite a handicap in that respect. A machine intelligence could, at least theoretically, pass around perfect copies of its learned knowledge near-instantly (maybe not though... integrating two neural networks that developed separately might be terribly difficult or even impossible... I wonder if anyone has attempted or studied this? If NNA learns to recognize human faces, and NNB learns to recognize text, is there a way to merge them? It's not like you can just average their weights together, especially if using a method that connects/prunes neurons as necessary). Humans, on the other hand, have to translate bioelectrochemical patterns created in very differently structured networks into flapping of a meat strip rhythmically to cause air vibrations that will rumble a thin membrane of meat, feeding electrical impulses into the differing network, and its success depends upon an expansive, and almost completely unknown (to us), body of similar, but not identical, experiences, from hearing the same patterns of sounds while seeing objects or pictures of objects, possibly decades earlier, to accepting unspoken social cues early in development. What is astonishing is that language works at all. It really, really sounds like it shouldn't have a snowballs chance in Hell. And the weird thing is, I've got this niggling suspicion that this handicap is actually a profound strength. That evolution didn't produce so many species of organisms separated by walls of flesh and bone, detached from one another and capable of wandering far apart, then incapable of even expressing fundamentally novel concepts (I mean novel novel, such that your language has no word for it and such that any metaphor would be more misleading than enlightening). We could have evolved such that when holding hands, a flow of specially produced chemicals seep from ones hand to the other, travelling to the brain and making the changes necessary to convey concepts exactly. Bacteria communicate in this way. They change each other. Directly. We could to. But... we don't. And there is maybe a reason for that.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    > But... we don't. And there is maybe a reason for that. There's a rather good argument that as a species, we're the stupidest thing nature could get away with that could still develop writing and science. So the reason may very well be that nature didn't bother.
jjaredsimpson 11y ago
Humanity isn't an actor with a will. It doesn't "do" anything. I was referencing the superiority of AI minds to biological minds. Humanity not a thing which possesses a mind.
- ajuc 11y ago
  How would you know as a lowly neuron?
- adrianN 11y ago
  In the same way a neuron is not something that possesses a mind, yet a suitably arranged collection of them suddenly does, I think one could argue that humanity is an actor with a will.
  - jjaredsimpson 11y ago
    That's not the same thing at all. Neurons do not possess a mind, yet a collection does. Humans do possess minds, and a collection of them does not. You can't use the first statement to support the opposite of the second statement because the premise is dissimilar.

by knughit 11y ago

TeMPOraL 11y ago

Indeed. And see how far we've managed to get after we've figured out a good way to pass learned knowledge around.

otakucode 11y ago
To be fair, we do have quite a handicap in that respect. A machine intelligence could, at least theoretically, pass around perfect copies of its learned knowledge near-instantly (maybe not though... integrating two neural networks that developed separately might be terribly difficult or even impossible... I wonder if anyone has attempted or studied this? If NNA learns to recognize human faces, and NNB learns to recognize text, is there a way to merge them? It's not like you can just average their weights together, especially if using a method that connects/prunes neurons as necessary). Humans, on the other hand, have to translate bioelectrochemical patterns created in very differently structured networks into flapping of a meat strip rhythmically to cause air vibrations that will rumble a thin membrane of meat, feeding electrical impulses into the differing network, and its success depends upon an expansive, and almost completely unknown (to us), body of similar, but not identical, experiences, from hearing the same patterns of sounds while seeing objects or pictures of objects, possibly decades earlier, to accepting unspoken social cues early in development. What is astonishing is that language works at all. It really, really sounds like it shouldn't have a snowballs chance in Hell. And the weird thing is, I've got this niggling suspicion that this handicap is actually a profound strength. That evolution didn't produce so many species of organisms separated by walls of flesh and bone, detached from one another and capable of wandering far apart, then incapable of even expressing fundamentally novel concepts (I mean novel novel, such that your language has no word for it and such that any metaphor would be more misleading than enlightening). We could have evolved such that when holding hands, a flow of specially produced chemicals seep from ones hand to the other, travelling to the brain and making the changes necessary to convey concepts exactly. Bacteria communicate in this way. They change each other. Directly. We could to. But... we don't. And there is maybe a reason for that.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  > But... we don't. And there is maybe a reason for that. There's a rather good argument that as a species, we're the stupidest thing nature could get away with that could still develop writing and science. So the reason may very well be that nature didn't bother.

jjaredsimpson 11y ago

Humanity isn't an actor with a will. It doesn't "do" anything. I was referencing the superiority of AI minds to biological minds. Humanity not a thing which possesses a mind.

ajuc 11y ago
How would you know as a lowly neuron?
adrianN 11y ago
In the same way a neuron is not something that possesses a mind, yet a suitably arranged collection of them suddenly does, I think one could argue that humanity is an actor with a will.
- jjaredsimpson 11y ago
  That's not the same thing at all. Neurons do not possess a mind, yet a collection does. Humans do possess minds, and a collection of them does not. You can't use the first statement to support the opposite of the second statement because the premise is dissimilar.