5 ms·

Human civilization is much more than 10,000 years old, but in any case robots can live longer and in more interesting modes (branching, eusocial, etc). They ca

by gumby 4y ago

Human civilization is much more than 10,000 years old, but in any case robots can live longer and in more interesting modes (branching, eusocial, etc). They can colonize all sorts of planets unsuitable for us. They should carry our culture, such as it is, forward to the stars and galaxies.

htag 4y ago
As a living organism I am most interested in increasing the resources and habitat size for my species and decedents. The amount of resources on Earth (or that we could bring to Earth) is a tiny fraction compared to what's available. More resources and more habitats means more people, which means more of everything that makes humanity awesome. The robots are just a forward scouting tool. Human civilization is essentially 10k years old on galactic time scales, with agriculture being ~12k years old.
- gumby 4y ago
  I am not the MAILMAN, I am also a living organism and I couldn't care less about those goals. I don't deny that you might have them but they are hardly an automatic consequence of being a human, much less some more general "living organism". They sound pretty high level to me, especially the bit about "species" (whatever that might really mean anyway). Speciation is a human construct. For all you know you are just running a program designed to transmit a message encoded in some "junk" DNA inherited from some long lost ancestor who was modified by some alien that crashed on our planet billions of years ago who hopes that some terrestrial decendent will eventually arrive at an inhabited planet where the residents will open up the astronaut, read the message, and come rescue your descendants to travel. Robots will be our real descendants.
  - htag 4y ago
    > I don't deny that you might have them but they are hardly an automatic consequence of being a human, much less some more general "living organism". Searching for resources, gathering them, and controlling territory from competitors are basic biological behaviors we see in most (all?) life. On a personal level this behavior might look like visiting a grocery store, storing the food at home, and locking your door. It seems reasonable that as our technology develops and we exhaust resources on Earth that we will need to increase our reach to resources and territories beyond Earth.
    - gumby 4y ago
      > Searching for resources, gathering them, and controlling territory from competitors are basic biological behaviors we see in most (all?) life. The vast majority of the mass of life on this planet does not participate in all (and probably in most cases any) of the behavior you describe. Stromatolites, various parasites and symbiotes, most bacteria, etc do little to none of that. Importing resources from other planets or other extraterrestrial bodies can and would better be done by robots than humans.
      - htag 4y ago
        Organelles such as flagellum are used for moving to find more resources. A large benefit of cell membranes is to provide a safe place for resources. I'd argue the entire lifecycle of parasites is to find (scout) suitable resource rich environments and to consume them all (gather), often in a way that wrestles territory control from it's host. Here are some articles describing bacteria doing the exact behaviors (search for resource, gather them, and territory control). * A good summary of group compeitive behavior of bacteria, including several territory control strategies. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2879262/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2879262/ * "Distinct foraging strategies generated by single-action behavioural flexibility" https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.03.09.434602v2.full.pdf https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.03.09.434602v2.... * Marine bacteria changing behavior around resource rich locations to improve resource gathering. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/09/200925113346.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/09/200925113346.h... * Description of bacteria predators, and complex hunting behavior (scout and gather) https://www.llnl.gov/news/predatory-bacteria-bite-their-own https://www.llnl.gov/news/predatory-bacteria-bite-their-own * Description of properties of bacteria colonies and territory expansion https://nbi.ku.dk/english/news/news20/bacteria-colonies-of-billions-invade-new-territories-without-traffic-jams--we-now-know-how/ https://nbi.ku.dk/english/news/news20/bacteria-colonies-of-b... EDIT: I wanted to respond to the point "Importing resources from other planets or other extraterrestrial bodies can and would better be done by robots than humans." I'm sure robotic mining will occur first. However, we have a limit on the amount of resources we can bring to Earth. An estimated 10% of the mass of the astroid belt is water (on Ceres). Saturn's rings contains about half of Earth's glacier's mass as water. There's likely a dozen more large water deposits in our solar system, although we know less about their total mass. Titan, Ganymede, Callisto, twenty more likely candidates. Imagine tripling the amount of water on Earth. Where would sea level be? This is just gathering all "nearby" water, our most basic resource. We also have to consider the demand for metals like gold, platinum and lithium. Our demand for nitrogen to fertilize soil. Our demand for fuel sources such as hydrogen/oxygen, helium-3, or uranium. There's simply more stuff in our solar system than we can possibly fit on Earth or LEO.
bboygravity 4y ago
I find it interesting that y'all seem to assume that humans will remain biological (for 400m+ years) and will somehow not merge with robots to make the humans vs robots discussion kind of irrelevant. AGI robots (humanities "daddies") won't care whether humans want to become interplanetary or not. It will just do it itself regardless.
- gumby 4y ago
  I do refer to them as "our children". We need to build these robots properly so that they take care of us and make us feel important.
hoten 4y ago
> more than 10kya How are you defining civilization?
- gumby 4y ago
  Writing is about 10 Ky old, but clearly organized groups with language, rituals, manufacturing, structures etc long predate that in the fossil record. Ok language of course technically doesn’t predate writing in the fossil record itself but writing, arithmetic, etc in many languages means that predated writing. Plato reported that Socrates opposed writing. Etc.
  - hoten 4y ago
    I'm still not clear on how you're defining civilization. The typical definition includes large population centers with some central authority, along with trade routes and divided labor. Roughly 3000-4000 BC IIRC. Writing isn't even as old as civilization by this definition. I'm curious where you're getting this huge 10,000 years ago number from. Maybe you're just rounding up and I'm being a pedant, but I don't think there's much that would be considered civilization many thousands of years prior to Sumer.
    - gumby 4y ago
      That's quite a Spenglarian definition of "civilization". Compare that to, say, Margaret Meade who gave an example of civilization being demonstrated by someone surviving for years post a traumatic injury (broken leg), which required specific non-animal level of cooperation and support of someone who couldn't hunt or gather.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - hoten 4y ago
        Of course, humans did not go from being unable to care for each other to forming cities overnight. Agriculture and even some amount of trading was happening far before people started wrangling cities within the same control structures. The moment in history when human settlements got large enough to encompass multiple locations and require coordination is a useful concept, and as far as I can tell, modern historians consider that to be around 4000 BC. That's not to say nothing interesting happened before, or no one was building things or whatever. It just wasn't happening at a scale that required things like a bureaucracy or writing to coordinate things across multiple places.

by gumby 4y ago

htag 4y ago

As a living organism I am most interested in increasing the resources and habitat size for my species and decedents. The amount of resources on Earth (or that we could bring to Earth) is a tiny fraction compared to what's available. More resources and more habitats means more people, which means more of everything that makes humanity awesome. The robots are just a forward scouting tool. Human civilization is essentially 10k years old on galactic time scales, with agriculture being ~12k years old.

gumby 4y ago
I am not the MAILMAN, I am also a living organism and I couldn't care less about those goals. I don't deny that you might have them but they are hardly an automatic consequence of being a human, much less some more general "living organism". They sound pretty high level to me, especially the bit about "species" (whatever that might really mean anyway). Speciation is a human construct. For all you know you are just running a program designed to transmit a message encoded in some "junk" DNA inherited from some long lost ancestor who was modified by some alien that crashed on our planet billions of years ago who hopes that some terrestrial decendent will eventually arrive at an inhabited planet where the residents will open up the astronaut, read the message, and come rescue your descendants to travel. Robots will be our real descendants.
- htag 4y ago
  > I don't deny that you might have them but they are hardly an automatic consequence of being a human, much less some more general "living organism". Searching for resources, gathering them, and controlling territory from competitors are basic biological behaviors we see in most (all?) life. On a personal level this behavior might look like visiting a grocery store, storing the food at home, and locking your door. It seems reasonable that as our technology develops and we exhaust resources on Earth that we will need to increase our reach to resources and territories beyond Earth.
  - gumby 4y ago
    > Searching for resources, gathering them, and controlling territory from competitors are basic biological behaviors we see in most (all?) life. The vast majority of the mass of life on this planet does not participate in all (and probably in most cases any) of the behavior you describe. Stromatolites, various parasites and symbiotes, most bacteria, etc do little to none of that. Importing resources from other planets or other extraterrestrial bodies can and would better be done by robots than humans.
    - htag 4y ago
      Organelles such as flagellum are used for moving to find more resources. A large benefit of cell membranes is to provide a safe place for resources. I'd argue the entire lifecycle of parasites is to find (scout) suitable resource rich environments and to consume them all (gather), often in a way that wrestles territory control from it's host. Here are some articles describing bacteria doing the exact behaviors (search for resource, gather them, and territory control). * A good summary of group compeitive behavior of bacteria, including several territory control strategies. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2879262/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2879262/ * "Distinct foraging strategies generated by single-action behavioural flexibility" https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.03.09.434602v2.full.pdf https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.03.09.434602v2.... * Marine bacteria changing behavior around resource rich locations to improve resource gathering. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/09/200925113346.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/09/200925113346.h... * Description of bacteria predators, and complex hunting behavior (scout and gather) https://www.llnl.gov/news/predatory-bacteria-bite-their-own https://www.llnl.gov/news/predatory-bacteria-bite-their-own * Description of properties of bacteria colonies and territory expansion https://nbi.ku.dk/english/news/news20/bacteria-colonies-of-billions-invade-new-territories-without-traffic-jams--we-now-know-how/ https://nbi.ku.dk/english/news/news20/bacteria-colonies-of-b... EDIT: I wanted to respond to the point "Importing resources from other planets or other extraterrestrial bodies can and would better be done by robots than humans." I'm sure robotic mining will occur first. However, we have a limit on the amount of resources we can bring to Earth. An estimated 10% of the mass of the astroid belt is water (on Ceres). Saturn's rings contains about half of Earth's glacier's mass as water. There's likely a dozen more large water deposits in our solar system, although we know less about their total mass. Titan, Ganymede, Callisto, twenty more likely candidates. Imagine tripling the amount of water on Earth. Where would sea level be? This is just gathering all "nearby" water, our most basic resource. We also have to consider the demand for metals like gold, platinum and lithium. Our demand for nitrogen to fertilize soil. Our demand for fuel sources such as hydrogen/oxygen, helium-3, or uranium. There's simply more stuff in our solar system than we can possibly fit on Earth or LEO.

bboygravity 4y ago

I find it interesting that y'all seem to assume that humans will remain biological (for 400m+ years) and will somehow not merge with robots to make the humans vs robots discussion kind of irrelevant. AGI robots (humanities "daddies") won't care whether humans want to become interplanetary or not. It will just do it itself regardless.

gumby 4y ago
I do refer to them as "our children". We need to build these robots properly so that they take care of us and make us feel important.

hoten 4y ago

> more than 10kya How are you defining civilization?

gumby 4y ago
Writing is about 10 Ky old, but clearly organized groups with language, rituals, manufacturing, structures etc long predate that in the fossil record. Ok language of course technically doesn’t predate writing in the fossil record itself but writing, arithmetic, etc in many languages means that predated writing. Plato reported that Socrates opposed writing. Etc.
- hoten 4y ago
  I'm still not clear on how you're defining civilization. The typical definition includes large population centers with some central authority, along with trade routes and divided labor. Roughly 3000-4000 BC IIRC. Writing isn't even as old as civilization by this definition. I'm curious where you're getting this huge 10,000 years ago number from. Maybe you're just rounding up and I'm being a pedant, but I don't think there's much that would be considered civilization many thousands of years prior to Sumer.
  - gumby 4y ago
    That's quite a Spenglarian definition of "civilization". Compare that to, say, Margaret Meade who gave an example of civilization being demonstrated by someone surviving for years post a traumatic injury (broken leg), which required specific non-animal level of cooperation and support of someone who couldn't hunt or gather.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - hoten 4y ago
      Of course, humans did not go from being unable to care for each other to forming cities overnight. Agriculture and even some amount of trading was happening far before people started wrangling cities within the same control structures. The moment in history when human settlements got large enough to encompass multiple locations and require coordination is a useful concept, and as far as I can tell, modern historians consider that to be around 4000 BC. That's not to say nothing interesting happened before, or no one was building things or whatever. It just wasn't happening at a scale that required things like a bureaucracy or writing to coordinate things across multiple places.