Re: singleton and memetics

Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
20 Nov 1998 11:28:08 +0100

"Eliezer S. Yudkowsky" <sentience@pobox.com> writes:

> For what it's worth, my guess is that there will not be duplicated
> calculations or module-based programming, at least if efficiency is being
> maximized.

You must factor robustness into efficiency. Having just one copy of each algorithm is a bad idea if there is any risk of it being damaged or unavailable (which can be a big problem for a distributed mind; "Darn! I need my low temperature manipulation skills, but I left them in the outer solar system!"). Another factor to think of is evolvability: is the system designed from scratch, or the result of a combination of many systems? You cannot just ignore legacy systems, and having a non-modular system makes change very hard.

You don't find any monoliths in nature.

> Two things to consider:
> 1) There's a lot of duplicated processing in the human race. Is it really
> necessary to have five billion copies of the walking algorithm?

Yes, unless you want that a communications glitch with the central server makes us all temporarily handicapped.

> 2) Ideal efficiency requires that there be only one Post-Singularity Entity,
> among all the races of all the Universes.

Sounds Tipleresque. But efficiency for what end? If the goal is not well-defined or requires complex information top-down solutions like you propose tend to be inferior to bottom-up solutions, even if they involve a high amount of redundancy and diversity.

-- 
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Anders Sandberg                                      Towards Ascension!
asa@nada.kth.se                            http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/
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