Re: The Singularity and the Impossible

Anders Sandberg (nv91-asa@nada.kth.se)
Thu, 12 Dec 1996 09:55:29 +0100 (MET)


On Wed, 11 Dec 1996, Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote:

> > 1) Faster than light travel is impossible.
> Wrong.
> > 2) Faster than light signaling can not be done.
> Wrong.
...
> > 8) A Quantum Computer will not be made in the next 15 years.
> Just plain wrong. Why not?

How can you be so certain of this? How do you justify it?

> > 6) Picotechnology is impossible because structures would not be rigid.
> Wrong. Rigidity is the last refuge of the computationally
> disadvantaged.

What is needed is not rigidity, but structure. Proteins are very
non-rigid, but quite good at a lot of things, including simple
information processing (witness the ribosomes). In the pico-realm, things
get blurred due to quantum fuzziness, but structure may still be
possible. What is uncertain is if structure can actually be maintained
and used to do something useful.

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