Empirically, progress in communication technology between humans outpaces progress in AI, and has done so for as long as digital computers have existed.
The best way to colonize Alpha Centauri has always been to wait for technology to improve rather than launching an expedition, but it’s impossible for that to continue to be true indefinitely. Short of direct mind-to-mind communication or something with a concurrent halt to AI progress, AI advances will probably outpace human communication advances in the near to medium term.
It seems unreasonable to believe human minds, optimized according to considerations such as politicking in addition to communication, will be able to communicate just as well as designed AIs. Human mind development was constrained by ancestral energy availability and head size, etc., so it’s unlikely that we represent optimally sized minds to form a group of minds, even assuming an AI isn’t able to reap huge efficiencies by becoming essentially as a single mind, regardless of scale.
Or human communications may stop improving because they are good enough to no longer be a major bottleneck, in which case it may not greatly matter whether other possible minds could do better. Amdahl’s law: if something was already only ten percent of total cost, improving it by a factor of infinity would reduce total cost by only that ten percent.
The best way to colonize Alpha Centauri has always been to wait for technology to improve rather than launching an expedition, but it’s impossible for that to continue to be true indefinitely. Short of direct mind-to-mind communication or something with a concurrent halt to AI progress, AI advances will probably outpace human communication advances in the near to medium term.
It seems unreasonable to believe human minds, optimized according to considerations such as politicking in addition to communication, will be able to communicate just as well as designed AIs. Human mind development was constrained by ancestral energy availability and head size, etc., so it’s unlikely that we represent optimally sized minds to form a group of minds, even assuming an AI isn’t able to reap huge efficiencies by becoming essentially as a single mind, regardless of scale.
Or human communications may stop improving because they are good enough to no longer be a major bottleneck, in which case it may not greatly matter whether other possible minds could do better. Amdahl’s law: if something was already only ten percent of total cost, improving it by a factor of infinity would reduce total cost by only that ten percent.