Anders Sandberg writes
>It is actually worse than that. The horizons are going to creep inwards,
>making the island smaller and smaller. Eventually everything gets
>separated from everything else.
Massive speedups of computing power will have the same effect, but
need hardly wait millions of years to happen. Supposing, as seems
extremely reasonable, that the speed of light is a constant, matter
will begin to develop so quickly so locally that the horizons
separate any two given nodes of sentience just as you suggest.
To a creature for whom a nanosecond is like a second to us, light will
appear to move less than one mile per hour. Distant regions of the
solar system will appear so remote that intellectual commerce might
almost completely disappear. Some concrete exceptions can be forseen,
though. Suppose for instance that it becomes known that matter at the
distance of Saturn has been working out the Ramsey numbers smaller than
(10,10) since "practically forever". It may be probable that it will
be more worthwhile to wait for their broadcast rather than complete
the computations locally.
But the most extreme exponents of the singularity will deny even this;
the capability for local computation in their scenarios explodes so
fast that within some finite time t any given calculation or
deliberation can more effectively be done locally.
Lee Corbin
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Mon May 28 2001 - 10:00:02 MDT