I agree that some significant fraction of typical humans would go mad in such a situation, but not all.
Good writers do this anyway—they focus and become absorbed on their writing, shutting out the outside world for a time.
Also, let’s assume the mind has the option of slowing down occasionally for normal social interactions. But remember that email, forums and the like are well-suited to time differential communication.
living a fundamentally different existence to any sort of being alive today
It’s not that different from being stuck in a basement with a old computer and internet connection. I think you are over-dramatizing.
At a frame of reference accelerated by an order of 10^6, a single second would translate to more than eleven days. You can’t accelerate the body to a remotely comparable degree. Can you imagine taking ten days to turn a page in a book? Waiting a month for a person to finish a sentence? You could IM with a million people at once and have the same information input to subjective time ratio, but you’d need a direct brain to computer interface to do it, because you wouldn’t be able to type fast enough otherwise. And would you want to hold a million conversations at once where you wait weeks to months for each individual to reply?
The comparison to writers is fairly absurd. Writers who lock themselves away for a few years are considered strange and remarkable recluses. You would achieve the same in subjective time by one or two minutes of contemplation. With your cognition running at top speed, from your own perspective you would be effectively unable to move. You would receive far less external stimulus in the same subjective time period as a writer recluse. It would be rather like spending years in solitary confinement, which, keep in mind, is widely considered to be a form of psychological torture.
Further relating to the writer comparison, without an interface with which you could store the fruits of your creativity, you would be dramatically limited in your ability to produce. Ever tried to store a complete book in your memory without writing any of it down?
In order to properly interact with the rest of the non-accelerated world, you would need to spend almost all of your time with your subjective perspective slowed by orders of magnitude. To do otherwise would require some fundamental alterations to human psychology.
At a frame of reference accelerated by an order of 10^6, a single second would translate to more than eleven days. You can’t accelerate the body to a remotely comparable degree. Can you imagine taking ten days to turn a page in a book?
I’m not sure what you mean by body—simulated body? This is an AGI design sitting in a data center—it’s basically a supercomputer.
Yes this mind would be unimaginably fast. When it runs at full speed the entire world outside slows down subjectively by a factor of a million. Light itself would subjectively move along at 300 centimeters per second.
Can you imagine taking ten days to turn a page in a book?
As I mentioned, it would be difficult to get a matrix like simulation moving at this speed, so you’d have only an extremely simple input/output system—a simple input terminal would be possible. You’d read books by downloading them in text form, no need for physical book simulations.
Now, if we really wanted to I’m sure it would be possible to design specialized simulation circuitry that could run some sort of more complex sim at these speeds, but that would add a large additional cost.
Further relating to the writer comparison, without an interface with which you could store the fruits of your creativity, you would be dramatically limited in your ability to produce.
You’d still have access to a bunch of computers and huge masses of storage—that wouldn’t be a problem. Text input/output is already so low bandwidth that speeding it up by a factor of a million is just not an issue.
In order to properly interact with the rest of the non-accelerated world, you would need to spend almost all of your time with your subjective perspective slowed by orders of magnitude.
Perhaps I’m just a recluse, but I can easily work on a writing project for entire days without any required human interaction.
And i’m not a monk. There’s an entire subculture of humans who have confined themselves into their own minds for extended periods, so this isn’t that crazy, especially if you had the ability to slow down.
Seriously, you wouldn’t want the ability to slow the outside world to a standstill and read a book or write something near instantaneously?
I’m not sure what you mean by body—simulated body? This is an AGI design sitting in a data center—it’s basically a supercomputer.
A supercomputer that you proposed to create by modeling the human brain. This is a really bad way to create something that thinks that fast, if you don’t want it to go insane. Especially if it doesn’t exist in a form that has the capacity to move.
Anything that could cope with that sort of accelerated frame of reference without interacting with similarly accelerated entities would not be reasonable to anthropomorphize, and anything with human like thought processes without similarly accelerated entities to interact with would probably not retain them for long.
Perhaps I’m just a recluse, but I can easily work on a writing project for entire days without any required human interaction.
And i’m not a monk. There’s an entire subculture of humans who have confined themselves into their own minds for extended periods, so this isn’t that crazy, especially if you had the ability to slow down.
Seriously, you wouldn’t want the ability to slow the outside world to a standstill and read a book or write something near instantaneously?
It would be a useful ability, but I sure as hell wouldn’t be able to spend most of my life that way, and I’m dramatically more reclusive than most people I know. Even monks don’t go for months or years without hearing other people speak, the only people who do that are generally considered to be crazy.
Especially if it doesn’t exist in a form that has the capacity to move.
As we are already dedicating a data-center to this machine, we can give it a large number of GPUs to run a matrix-like simulation. Thinking at human speeds it could interact in an extremely detailed Matrix-like environment. The faster it thinks, the less detailed the environment can be.
Anything that could cope with that sort of accelerated frame of reference without interacting with similarly accelerated entities would not be reasonable to anthropomorphize
What? The accelerated frame of reference does not change how the mind thinks, it changes the environment.
It is exactly equivalent to opening portals to other sub-universes where time flows differently. You can be in the 1x matrix where everything is detailed and you can interact with regular humans. You can then jump to the 1000x matrix where it’s low-detailed video game graphics and you can only interact with other 1000x AIs. And then there is the 1000000x environment which is just you and a text terminal interface to slow computers and any other really fast AIs.
With variable clock rate stepping the mind could switch between these sub-universes at will.
I agree that some significant fraction of typical humans would go mad in such a situation, but not all.
Good writers do this anyway—they focus and become absorbed on their writing, shutting out the outside world for a time.
Also, let’s assume the mind has the option of slowing down occasionally for normal social interactions. But remember that email, forums and the like are well-suited to time differential communication.
It’s not that different from being stuck in a basement with a old computer and internet connection. I think you are over-dramatizing.
At a frame of reference accelerated by an order of 10^6, a single second would translate to more than eleven days. You can’t accelerate the body to a remotely comparable degree. Can you imagine taking ten days to turn a page in a book? Waiting a month for a person to finish a sentence? You could IM with a million people at once and have the same information input to subjective time ratio, but you’d need a direct brain to computer interface to do it, because you wouldn’t be able to type fast enough otherwise. And would you want to hold a million conversations at once where you wait weeks to months for each individual to reply?
The comparison to writers is fairly absurd. Writers who lock themselves away for a few years are considered strange and remarkable recluses. You would achieve the same in subjective time by one or two minutes of contemplation. With your cognition running at top speed, from your own perspective you would be effectively unable to move. You would receive far less external stimulus in the same subjective time period as a writer recluse. It would be rather like spending years in solitary confinement, which, keep in mind, is widely considered to be a form of psychological torture.
Further relating to the writer comparison, without an interface with which you could store the fruits of your creativity, you would be dramatically limited in your ability to produce. Ever tried to store a complete book in your memory without writing any of it down?
In order to properly interact with the rest of the non-accelerated world, you would need to spend almost all of your time with your subjective perspective slowed by orders of magnitude. To do otherwise would require some fundamental alterations to human psychology.
I’m not sure what you mean by body—simulated body? This is an AGI design sitting in a data center—it’s basically a supercomputer.
Yes this mind would be unimaginably fast. When it runs at full speed the entire world outside slows down subjectively by a factor of a million. Light itself would subjectively move along at 300 centimeters per second.
As I mentioned, it would be difficult to get a matrix like simulation moving at this speed, so you’d have only an extremely simple input/output system—a simple input terminal would be possible. You’d read books by downloading them in text form, no need for physical book simulations.
Now, if we really wanted to I’m sure it would be possible to design specialized simulation circuitry that could run some sort of more complex sim at these speeds, but that would add a large additional cost.
You’d still have access to a bunch of computers and huge masses of storage—that wouldn’t be a problem. Text input/output is already so low bandwidth that speeding it up by a factor of a million is just not an issue.
Perhaps I’m just a recluse, but I can easily work on a writing project for entire days without any required human interaction.
And i’m not a monk. There’s an entire subculture of humans who have confined themselves into their own minds for extended periods, so this isn’t that crazy, especially if you had the ability to slow down.
Seriously, you wouldn’t want the ability to slow the outside world to a standstill and read a book or write something near instantaneously?
A supercomputer that you proposed to create by modeling the human brain. This is a really bad way to create something that thinks that fast, if you don’t want it to go insane. Especially if it doesn’t exist in a form that has the capacity to move.
Anything that could cope with that sort of accelerated frame of reference without interacting with similarly accelerated entities would not be reasonable to anthropomorphize, and anything with human like thought processes without similarly accelerated entities to interact with would probably not retain them for long.
It would be a useful ability, but I sure as hell wouldn’t be able to spend most of my life that way, and I’m dramatically more reclusive than most people I know. Even monks don’t go for months or years without hearing other people speak, the only people who do that are generally considered to be crazy.
Most of your life in subjective or physical time?
Either. I might be able to spend a comparable proportion of my subjective time in an accelerated frame of reference, but not a significant majority.
As we are already dedicating a data-center to this machine, we can give it a large number of GPUs to run a matrix-like simulation. Thinking at human speeds it could interact in an extremely detailed Matrix-like environment. The faster it thinks, the less detailed the environment can be.
What? The accelerated frame of reference does not change how the mind thinks, it changes the environment.
It is exactly equivalent to opening portals to other sub-universes where time flows differently. You can be in the 1x matrix where everything is detailed and you can interact with regular humans. You can then jump to the 1000x matrix where it’s low-detailed video game graphics and you can only interact with other 1000x AIs. And then there is the 1000000x environment which is just you and a text terminal interface to slow computers and any other really fast AIs.
With variable clock rate stepping the mind could switch between these sub-universes at will.