3 ms·
>But if strong AI is possible[...]but why haven't their robotic spawn already shown up and disassembled a few moons into robot factories? But what for? Per art
by xoa 8y ago
>But if strong AI is possible[...]but why haven't their robotic spawn already shown up and disassembled a few moons into robot factories?
But what for? Per article assumptions lets start by assuming an STL regime. It's not unreasonable to guess that strong AI would, even if it was entirely benevolent and decided to maintain an eternal space for its originators (in fact perhaps particularly in that case), wish to have more computation and storage power. It has plenty of time. So it constructs huge computational systems, with the thermodynamic end goal being some sort of stellar engine like a matrioshka brain. Even long before that though just with near-future tech it'd be likely to move into a rather huge computer system, probably planetary scale.
However doesn't that immediately back it into a bit of a corner at least near term? In an STL regime there is no way to send huge amounts of mass interstellar nor information over anything but an extreme time scale and a lot of energy consumed. A "big intelligence" without miracle tech would in fact be physically big too, it'll consume a lot of mass and energy running itself. The only way to leave its solar system would be to either lobotomize itself to the point of effective suicide or to construct a fully equivalent remote location and then either clone itself or transfer (the difference being whether it deleted the original location after a successful copy), which would still be an incredibly difficult and energy intensive and time costly affair. It might be justified in the case where a being wanted to continue to exist after its star left main sequence maybe but it wouldn't be trivial. The very fact of its strong AI existence could easily make it hard to travel.
So what are the von Neumann probes for? Like, picking a couple young promising systems as backups makes sense but why the whole galaxy? At some point extra backups with 100k year deltas or worse wouldn't actually add any significant redundancy, the lifespan of the galaxy itself would become limiting. Long before that having another strong AI develop might even be seen as attractive, assuming it wasn't insane. A well entrenched and developed AI or AI civ could conceivably feel secure enough that it/they could survive and snuff out trouble from anything new before it was an existential threat, and in turn decide the risk vs the reward of something new and interesting would be worth it. And the more in a agreement like that the more secure it can be.
- red75prime 8y agoThere's always star lifting. Building stockpiles of hydrogen seems to be a reasonable step to prolong active existence in the light of inevitable heat death of universe.
- resu_nimda 8y agoAre you arguing that the probes would be too difficult, or that the civilization/AI would simply choose not to use them? If we assume that the system is still working at the behest of or at least in cooperation with its human creators, I think "because we can" is enough to make it happen. We seem to have an innate drive to expand and explore and see what's out there.
- xoa 8y ago>Are you arguing that the probes would be too difficult, or that the civilization/AI would simply choose not to use them? I'm arguing a strong AI (singly or civilization based around some) might simply choose not to go the full "deconstruct everything in every solar system in the galaxy" route, because by virtue of its very existence it can't actually travel easily or at all. Exploration sure, but in the form of lots of star wisps and maybe a few stealthy replications in oort clouds or systems already checked for activity. Now if a civilization explicitly chose to avoid strong AI, or at least put some sort of firm cap on it, precisely due to foreseeing being locked to their star (or maybe their star and a few near neighbors) that'd be different, but would that actually be stable itself? It would be risky if they encountered an alien stronger AI too perhaps. I mean we're by definition in pretty deep pure speculation territory here, and others have devoted far more thought to any of this then I. I'm just saying that if there is no magic then everything still has to deal with the laws of thermodynamics and relativity. And widely spread concentrated point energy/mass sources (stars/solar systems) are what everything has to work with in that case, which means there has to be a pretty hard tradeoff between "intelligence" (processing/storage ability) and to what extent something can exist away from stars or move between them. Even go a fraction of the way towards maxing out what you can do with the available mass and energy in a solar system and it's simultaneously hard to go away from a solar system right? So basically I'm saying going maximal von Neumann across the galaxy isn't clearly the ultimate end state of a civ reaching strong AI level.
- red75prime 8y ago0.0001% of Sun energy output can give about 500000m/s^2 acceleration to a million tonne payload, if I'm not mistaken.