From: Wei Dai (weidai@weidai.com)
Date: Tue Aug 05 2003 - 03:39:35 MDT
On Mon, Aug 04, 2003 at 05:16:35PM -0700, Robert J. Bradbury wrote:
> I apologize -- I do not recall seeing this earlier or the post you cite:
> http://www.extropy.org/exi-lists/archive/0205/106121.html
> (which raises a number of issues, some of which I'm going to have
> to reflect upon).
Yikes, I thought my memory was bad... If you follow the link you quote you
can find a post from you responding to a part of my post that you can't
recall seeing. See also
http://www.extropy.org/exi-lists/archive/9912/48248.html where you
responded to my sugestion of dumping entropy into black holes.
> It is going to create a very interesting tradeoff -- if you want
> the greatest computing capacity one is going to want a black hole
> with a small mass (smaller event horizon). This is going to increase
> the production of Hawking radiation and will decrease the lifetime
> of the black hole. So you may be able to compute "more" but you
> will do so for a shorter period of time before your means to do so
> fails you.
A big unknown here is whether future SIs will have secure property rights.
If they don't have to worry about predation, then there is no reason to
trade total computational capacity for speed. They can just take their
time and maximize the total amount of computation they do over the entire
history of the universe. If they do have to worry about it then they will
have to sacrifice long term computation for short term computation in
order to defend themselves. These two potential scenarios imply very
different things about the optimal computing architecture of the future.
> To be honest I do not know. In part I think it may be a decline on
> the part of non-agricultural parents to need more children (to bring
> in the harvest, etc.). In part I think it may be because parents
> (once they have control over reproductive processes) may choose to
> focus limited resources on fewer children. It may be a shift from
> "I want 'more' children" to "I want 'better' children". But those
> would only be guesses on my part. Though if the last hypothesis is
> correct the development of inexpensive genetic testing and greater
> knowledge of how genes influence capabilities would suggest that the
> trends will continue.
These are reasonable proximate causes for declining fertility rates in
rich societies, but I'm more interested in the ultimate (i.e.,
evolutionary) causes. Are we just lucky that unlike every other species on
Earth we are not all in a malthusian struggle for existence, or is there a
reason to expect this of most intelligent species? The former would be
better news than the latter, since it implies that the demographic
transition is part of the Great Filter, and that we're already past the
step.
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