Re: The Singularity

Eugene Leitl (eugene@liposome.genebee.msu.su)
Thu, 16 Jul 1998 21:38:56 +0400 (MSD)

Robin Hanson writes:

> Does saying "IMO" mean you don't think you can articulate *why* one can't
> "assign a probability"? Taken literally, your claim seems clearly false.
> So what exactly do you mean?

Robin, I'm not sure I get your meaning, but I certainly agree with Dan's position. I'm not even sure Darwin still holds in the SI domain, I'm not certain of anything. I do not see how anyone who goes on two legs can sensibly speculate about that _hypothetic_ future entity/state labelled 'SI'. If in the retrospective (if we survive the Grand Transition) someone's visions turn out to be right in the outline, the more power to you++. It is certainly mentally stimulating speculating about autoreplicator colonization fronts, GUT devices, quantum and recursive basement universe computing, etc., but just now this is entertainment. We need the pre-SI models to dynamically adjust our trajectories as we fall into the Singularity, and there will be probably no discontinuity involved as the observer traverses the prediction analogon of the Schwarzschild radius, but we should not try to forecast too far too soon.

'gene