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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 fr

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? I don't understand the "too big/locked to a star" idea. It's not like all that mass/energy would be locked into one giant indivisible entity (if that is your assumption, why?). With current space travel, we don't attempt to move our entire civilization to the Moon or to Mars in one big go. We send out a small piece that establishes itself and then grows, and perhaps over time the rest is migrated if necessary, but the original entity goes on existing for some time while the probe gets established. I'm not saying they would deconstruct everything in every solar system but it seems it would be pretty likely for a civilization at that level to develop a program that establishes some kind of presence in as many systems as possible.

xoa 8y ago
>It's not like all that mass/energy would be locked into one giant indivisible entity (if that is your assumption, why?) Yeah it is. That's the assumption right from the start here, embodied in "strong AI" and that I've repeatedly and explicitly referred to throughout including a reflection on why it might be consciously avoided and whether that could work too. A strong AI could grow to use any amount of available computational and memory capacity, and might well need to in order to accomplish some things. There would certainly be advantages to having a higher degree of thought possible. That's the whole question raised by the OP of this thread. Again, if you want to instead theorize why strong AI might be explicitly avoided by a civilization that's fine, but that's not the premise I was replying to originally is all.
- resu_nimda 8y ago
  I guess I just don’t share your belief that strong AI is necessarily equivalent to a paperclip maximizer that will seek to assimilate all available resources into one monolithic mass. Do the humans have any say in this, any control? If not, how/why are they being kept alive? Again, even if the AI is so myopic that it won’t spare any resources to expand into other systems, the humans will still want to.

xoa 8y ago

>It's not like all that mass/energy would be locked into one giant indivisible entity (if that is your assumption, why?) Yeah it is. That's the assumption right from the start here, embodied in "strong AI" and that I've repeatedly and explicitly referred to throughout including a reflection on why it might be consciously avoided and whether that could work too. A strong AI could grow to use any amount of available computational and memory capacity, and might well need to in order to accomplish some things. There would certainly be advantages to having a higher degree of thought possible. That's the whole question raised by the OP of this thread. Again, if you want to instead theorize why strong AI might be explicitly avoided by a civilization that's fine, but that's not the premise I was replying to originally is all.

resu_nimda 8y ago
I guess I just don’t share your belief that strong AI is necessarily equivalent to a paperclip maximizer that will seek to assimilate all available resources into one monolithic mass. Do the humans have any say in this, any control? If not, how/why are they being kept alive? Again, even if the AI is so myopic that it won’t spare any resources to expand into other systems, the humans will still want to.