> how [...] return on the money invested? What’s the business plan? I don't understand this question. How could even average-human-level AGI not be useful in business, and profitable, a million different ways? (you know, just like humans except more so?). Let alone higher-human-level, let alone moderately-super-human level, let alone exponential level if you are among the first? (And see Charles Stross, Accelerando, 2005 for how being first is not the end of the story.) I can see one way for "not profitable" for most applications - if computing for AGI becomes too expensive, that is,…
I hate Web3...and I love Web3. Let me explain. Web3 is akin to SOA. The concept of service-orientation was great. We could think of systems as discrete services, each single responsibility, and each working with other services to accomplish a system. Awesome. And so it became popular. Then training courses, certifications, consultants all started to appear in order to cash in on this new thing. It took little time to get to the point where you could ask 10 people what SOA really meant and get 15 different answers, some of them completely incompatible with each other. A similar thing…
We don't necessarily need to build a Dyson sphere to reach other planets and stars. And if the Dyson sphere gets built by an aggressive singularity to the tune of Stross' Accelerando, then pretty much every human in that singularity's light cone is at serious risk. If that happens, we may have to broadcast human mind vectors out into the galaxy and hope a less awful singularity catches us and gives us a simulated home with reasonable Mind Rights. Humans have a survival impetus to settle multiple planets and star systems. But a fast burn self improving Dyson swarm might easily create more…
There's a sequence of stories/books that I like on the subject in that the later ones reference the earlier ones. We start off with BLIT. http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/blit.htm https://www.nature.com/articles/44964 https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/different-kinds-o... That wasn't so much as a story about AGI, just a starting spot. Then we go to Accelerando. https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/acceler... > ... Luckily, infowar turns out to be more survivable than nuclear war – especially once it is discovered that a simple anti-aliasing filter stops…
> Which leads me to ask: in a transhumanist society—go read Accelerando, or Glasshouse, or The Rapture of the Nerds—what currently recognized crimes need to be re-evaluated because their social impact has changed? And what strange new crimes might universally be recognized by a society with, for example, mind uploading, strong AI, or near-immortality? The link to Accelerando there is to Amazon (which is fine, and I do have physical and digital versions of the book and feel that it is good and useful to support authors by purchasing the stories they write)... but you can also get it for free,…
There's a sequence of stories by different authors that allude to one another that I find to be an interesting read in that order. First, there's the BLIT stories by David Langford. Several of these are online. https://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/blit.htm https://www.nature.com/articles/44964 (did you know that Nature did science fiction short stories? https://www.nature.com/nature/articles?type=futures ) https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/different-kinds-o... Then, you go to Accelerando https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/acceler... > Luckily, infowar…
Thanks for the comment and links. I had only ever read 'science fiction' like Ian Banks and Charles Stross Accelerando, but never any of the 'non-fiction'. The linked articles were interesting. I understand that the risk of an AI that wants the mass of the entire solar system as its own and quickly becomes a matrioska brain. However, I question the idea that we aren't already there. I would argue that an augmented billionaire or better yet, a market economy compares to someone in the poorest 5% of the world just like a modern human compares to a wolf pack. A billionaire can decide not…
Am I the only one sick of singularity writers? Its been explored since at least the 1990s and its just... boring. No wonder weirdo dystopian sci-fi/fantasy and "sci-lit" is so popular now. This ground has been retread so many times, I'm not sure where it can go or who is truly enjoying it. Heck, Accelerando is practically a parody of singularity writing fads and its ten years old! I think this is how people felt in the 50s and 60s when "monster/alien of the week" type potboilers ruled sci-fi until a new generation of writers like Bester, Dick, Lem, Roddenberry, and others started to break…
"The Information Problem"[0] has always been regarded as the insurmountable poison pill inside of Socialism's command economy, so it's completely unsurprising that it attracts engineers. The problem with solving the Information Problem, as Charles Stross notes[1], is that people will know that it was solved by other people. Thus a technical solution in a national context becomes a political proposition, where it's going to instantly die at the cash-laden hands of the rentiers. Engineering isn't the problem. It's within human means to solve the Information Problem, now, with current…
There is an interesting sci-fi version of Mormonism's baptism of the dead & Tipler's Omega Point in Charles Stross's Accelerando: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/acceler... > The Church of Latter-Day Saints believes that you can't get into the Promised Land unless it's baptized you – but it can do so if it knows your name and parentage, even after you're dead. Its genealogical databases are among the most impressive artifacts of historical research ever prepared. And it likes to make converts. > The remaining faithful of the Latter-Day Saints are correlating the…