Re: Making the Most of What We Have

Eugene Leitl (Eugene.Leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen.de)
Mon, 11 Nov 1996 15:14:54 +0100 (MET)


On Sun, 10 Nov 1996, banjo wrote:

> > _Finest_ - grain parallelism is the only option possible.
>
> The sort of uploading that interests me, would be to keep my body
> but use nanotech to improve and augment.

Caveats: It depends, whether strong (Drexlerian) nanotech is workable,
furthermore on continuing availability of biocompatible habitats, which
is not certain, should inner planets of our system to become disassembled.

> Could each neuron be rebuilt to run faster ?

Yes, drastically so.

> And store huge libraries and complex programs built into my skull,
> collar bone or pelvis ?

Absolutely.

> Nano-bots reparing cell damage ?

It depends on the cell damage. A dry, rigid system, which operates by
mechanosynthesis has got some problems in a wet, squishy body. It can't
achieve atomic resolution, because the stuff is so wobbly, but it will
detect macroscopic defects, even misfolded proteins. It's pretty big, so
it has to elbow away cells on its way. It will need infrastructure to be
provided with fuel from an external source (orelse you'll need to eat
_huge_ meals) as well as pipelines to access prefab stuff from caches, it
will need means of communication with its kin (emergent behaviour of agent
clusters).

> Im a busking songwriting banjo player, i'd love to be able to call
> up a songs' score, and be able to hold thousands of songs in my head.
> To have the tools that i have on my PC intuitively accessable inside
> my own head would be great.

Right.

> I love being a human, and have no desire to upload myself just upgrade.

It depends whether Singularity will zoom its blue-shifted streak across
the sky and transcends quietly, or remains linked to matter, busily
gnawing away at easily accesible resources first, disassembling even
relatively inaccesible things at the bottow of gravity wells later.
Whether the Powers will remember their origins, and treat bipedal
primates kindly or merely as a light-element source, remains to be seen...

'gene

> -banjo
>
>
>

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