Dan Hook wrote:
>
> The chances of developing a seed AI before military nanotech seem
> increasingly dismal. The best hope now would appear to be completion of a
> nanotech design for a terrestrial evacuation system before we have actual
> assemblers. This is still an enormously complex project, but it appears
> to be simpler than creating a mind. The problem is that it requires
> skills less prevalent than computer programming, requires more expensive
> equipment, and is not likely to produce profitable spinoffs in the mean
> time. Perhaps I just don't have enough imagination for the last one.
> Ideas would be helpful.
I'm certainly starting to factor nanotech evacuation preplanning into my schemes. Drexler just has too much of a head start on me. But on the other hand, we can look at this optimistically; with enough luck, 2005 could see the debut of reasonably good AI. Maybe enough for seed AI, given massive computing power; enough for a nanotech-domain AI to predesign a complete evacuation system, otherwise.
As JKC points out, protein folding doesn't translate directly to drextech. We'll still have a couple of years to try and rent out Blue Gene or the equivalent. Since I gave up on the idea of running distributed over the Internet, my visualization called for the development of massive supercomputers in any case, 'though I was hoping they'd be rented out. (But building a research machine is certainly a step toward building more.)
Both versions of the apocalypse remain on schedule.
--
sentience@pobox.com Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
http://pobox.com/~sentience/tmol-faq/meaningoflife.html
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