This (the Sun is the only important local source of … anything) has been an obvious conclusion for decades. Freeman Dyson described one avenue to capturing all the energy in 1960. The recent changes that make it more salient (and framed as “eating or inhabiting the sun” rather than “capturing the sun’s output”) is the recent progress in AI, which does two things:
Adds weight to the computational theory of mind. If everything important is “just” computation, then all this expense and complexity of human bodies and organic brains is temporary and will be unnecessary in the future. This simplifies the problem of HOW to eat the sun into just how to make computronium out of it.
Provides a more believable path for solving very hard engineering problems, by using smarter engineers than we can currently birth and train. It does NOT actually solve the problems, or even prove that they’re solvable. We don’t actually know what computation is (for this purpose), or how to optimize the entropy problem of “making one thing more ordered always makes other things less ordered”.
That said, I don’t know how to make beliefs on this scale pay any rent. “within 10,000 years” and “that’s just science fiction” are identical labels to me.
This (the Sun is the only important local source of … anything) has been an obvious conclusion for decades. Freeman Dyson described one avenue to capturing all the energy in 1960. The recent changes that make it more salient (and framed as “eating or inhabiting the sun” rather than “capturing the sun’s output”) is the recent progress in AI, which does two things:
Adds weight to the computational theory of mind. If everything important is “just” computation, then all this expense and complexity of human bodies and organic brains is temporary and will be unnecessary in the future. This simplifies the problem of HOW to eat the sun into just how to make computronium out of it.
Provides a more believable path for solving very hard engineering problems, by using smarter engineers than we can currently birth and train. It does NOT actually solve the problems, or even prove that they’re solvable. We don’t actually know what computation is (for this purpose), or how to optimize the entropy problem of “making one thing more ordered always makes other things less ordered”.
That said, I don’t know how to make beliefs on this scale pay any rent. “within 10,000 years” and “that’s just science fiction” are identical labels to me.