Vaster than Empires and More Cold (was Re: Genius Dogs)

Damien Broderick (damien@ariel.ucs.unimelb.edu.au)
Fri, 10 Oct 1997 12:20:17 +0000


At 11:02 AM 10/9/97 -0700, Hal wrote of John Clark's repost:

>> After evolving for a few hundred million SIMULATED years
>> you have intelligence, high order intelligence.

>What makes them become intelligent is the challenge presented to the
>brains by the environment. [...]
>So it would be necessary to simulate not only the brains, but the bodies
>and the environment where the brains interact.

And unless we made the simulated environment isomorphic to our own (to the
historical layers of our own, including ourselves), that ` intelligence,
high order intelligence' will surely be wildly, weirdly, dangerously,
incommensurably *dangerous*. `Intellects,' as Wells said of the Martians,
`vast cool and unsympathetic' - not by their own standards, of course, but
by ours.

Damien Broderick