| I'm with you on this, and I logged in just to upvote your comment. Thanks! :) shouldn't we step back and question this Promethean effort? is feasible to stop technological progress is a separate question. The only way to stop it would be to classify GPUs as weapons of mass destruction. But, that's a non-starter because all our fabs aren't US based, so if we restricted domestic GPU usage, then fer'ners would just use them all and create god forms in their own image. Isn't it amusing how when people think "friendly AI," the "AI" always seems to have the motivations and personality of a 25 year old startup scene white guy living in San Francisco? What if the AI is made by a fanatic in a marginalized country? That's the "friendly-vs-not-friendly" dichotomy, but there's no way to force one way or the other (without restricting hardware access). Over all, global capitalism doesn't really allow for holding anything back for the sake of "a better world." We stand on the broken backs of others so we, ourselves, can rise taller, thereby proving we are better than the unwashed masses. We are special individuals because we have the vision, audacity, power, to exploit the rest of the world en masse. Tremble before our bank accounts, mansions, and political connections. then shouldn't he or she do everything they can to stop it? Thought experiment: what if "what comes next" is better than humanity? Industrial-scale human civilization so far hasn't been great for other life on this planet. What if "regular" apes had the forethought to kill the antecedent human mutated apes because it would eventually be bad for the planet? Would restricting advancement have been a better plan than letting new intelligence be birthed, even if it destroyed all the old ways? The question ends up being: do we commence a Butlerian Jihad or do we admit we are imperfect meat machines and, perhaps, tens of billions of meat forms aren't ideal citizens of anything given a long enough time horizon? |
Better from whose perspective? :)
The machines can potentially be more durable, and also scalable. We are fragile, we don't scale very well (though trying hard through globalization). Today we can't even backup/restore a person's mind. In fact I think self-aware intelligent machines will appear sooner than the technology to backup our own biological brains.
They will scale their brains, they will expand their "natural habitat" towards other planets, solar systems and even galaxies, like those all-eating self-replicating automatons. Easily.
So while we are at it, looking at the grand scale of things, just one question: where are all these machine civilizations in the Universe? Why aren't there any traces of exponentially growing all-consuming machine civilizations anywhere?