GeraldMonroe

Karma: 122

GeraldMonroe May 29, 2013, 1:23 AM
3 points
on: Who thinks quantum computing will be necessary for AI?
These people’s objections are not entirely unfounded. It’s true that there is little evidence the brain exploits QM effects (which is not to say that it is completely certain it does not). However, if you try to pencil in real numbers for the hardware requirements for a whole brain emulation, they are quite absurd. Assumptions differ, but it is possible that to build a computational system with sufficient nodes to emulate all 100 trillion synapses would cost hundreds of billions to over a trillion dollars if you had to use today’s hardware to do it.

The point is : you can simplify people’s arguments to “I’m not worried about the imminent existence of AI because we cannot build the hardware to run one”. The fact that a detail about their argument is wrong doesn’t change the conclusion.

GeraldMonroe Jan 29, 2013, 9:47 PM
−2 points
in reply to: Manfred’s comment on: Isolated AI with no chat whatsoever
A stable outcome is possible where such a self-improving AI is unable to form.

The outcome can happen if the “human based” AIs occupy all ecological space within this solar system. That is, there might be humans alive, but all significant resources would be policed by the AIs. Assuming a self-improving AI, no matter how smart, still needs access to matter and energy to grow, then it would not ever be able to gain a foothold.

The real life example is earth’s biosphere : all living things are restricted to a subset of the possible solution space for a similar reason, and have been for several billion years.

GeraldMonroe Jan 29, 2013, 2:03 AM
−4 points
on: Isolated AI with no chat whatsoever
Alternate Proposal : here’s a specific, alternate proposal developed with feedback from members of the #FAI channel on IRC.

Instead of building non-human optimizing algorithms, we develop accurate whole brain emulations of once living people. The simulation hardware is a set of custom designed chips with hardware restricts that prevent external writes to the memory cells storing the parameters for each emulated synapse. That is to say, the emulated neural network can update it’s synapses and develop new ones (aka it can learn) but the wires that allow it to totally rewrite itself are disconnected permanently in the chip. (it’s basically a write once FPGA. You need to write once to take the compiled mapping of a human mind and load it into the chips)

Thus, these emulations of human beings can only change themselves in a limited manner. This restriction is present in real human brain tissue : neurons in lower level systems have far less flexibility during the lifespan of adults. You cannot “learn” to not breathe, for instance. (you can hold your breath via executive function but once you pass out, cells in the brainstem will cause you to breathe again)

This security measure prevents a lot of possible failures.

Anyways, you don’t just scan and emulate one human being. An isolated person is not an entity capable of prolonged independent operation and self improvement. Humans have evolved to function properly in small tribes. So you have to scan enough people to create an entire tribe, sufficient for the necessary social bonds and so forth needed to keep people sane. During this entire process, you use hardware blocks to physically prevent the emulation speed from exceeding a certain multiple of realtime. (current limiters or something)

Once you have an entire working tribe of sane people, interconnected in a manner that allows them to act like checks on each other, you gradually increase their responsibility and capabilities. (by boosting emulation speeds, making them responsible for gradually more complex systems, etc)

Eventually, this emulated tribe would run at a maximum rate of perhaps 10^6 times real-time and be capable of performing self improvement to a limited degree. Compared to extant human beings, people like this would have effective super-intelligence and would most likely be capable of solving problems to improve the quality and length of human lives. Maybe they could not develop “magic” and take over the universe (if that is possible) but they could certainly solve the problems of humanity.

I’d much rather have a weak super-intelligence smart enough to make great quality 3d molecular printers, and giant space habitats for humans to live in, and genetic patches to stop all human aging and disease, and slow but working starships, and a sane form of government, and a method to backup human personalities to recover from accidental and violent death, and so on at the head of things.

Ideally, this super-intelligence would consist of a network of former humans who cannot change so much as to forget their roots. (because of those previously mentioned blocks in the hardware)

GeraldMonroe Jan 29, 2013, 1:51 AM
3 points
on: Isolated AI with no chat whatsoever
How would you build such an AI? Most or all proposals for developing a super-human AI require extensive feedback between the AI and the environment. A machine cannot iteratively learn how to become super-intelligent if it has no way of testing improvements to itself versus the real universe and feedback from it’s operators, can it?

I’ll allow that if an extremely computationally expensive simulation of the real world were used, it is at least possible to imagine that the AI could iteratively make itself smarter by using the simulation to test improvements.

However, this poses a problem. At some point N years from today, it is predicted that we will have sufficiently advanced computer hardware to support a super intelligent AI. (N can be negative for those who believe that day is in the past). So we need X amount of computational power (I think using the Whole Brain Emulation roadmap can give you a guesstimate for X)

Well, to also simulate enough of the universe to a sufficient level of detail for the AI to learn against it, we need Y amount of computational power. Y is a big number, and most likely bigger than X. Thus, there will be years (decades?, centuries?) which X is available to a sufficiently well funded group, but X+Y is not.

It’s entirely reasonable to suppose that we will have to deal with AI (and survive them...) before we ever have the ability to create this kind of box.

GeraldMonroe Dec 31, 2012, 9:55 PM
2 points
on: [Link] Statistically, People Are Not Very Good At Making Voting Decisions
If you think about voting decisions as an intelligent collective entity making decisions, the question naturally arises : why does the system work at all? Sure, there are massive flaws, but overall the governments of the United States does maintain a powerful military, build and maintain a decent set of roads, keep the mail delivered, care for millions via the VA, etc, etc, etc.

(note : state government is typically selected through even more arbitrary and uninformed votes)

If you think of the masses as a collective with an IQ down in the mentally retarded range, it is difficult to see how this is even possible at all.

There are various theories, of course, but one possibility is that a “bug” in the system is why it even functions. Powerful people in “smoke filled back rooms” decide who the candidates for office that the masses choose between actually are. These people are themselves intelligent and they are selecting intelligent enough decision makers that the system continues to function, more or less. The problems are mostly limited to cases where the powerful people calling the shots collectively make short-sighted decisions, such as sponsoring candidates for office who would rather lower taxes now and allow the roads to go to ruin, and so on.

No, I don’t think these powerful people in smoke filled back rooms coordinate with each other very much. This is the difference between this hypothesis and the “conspiracy” hypothesis people create to explain how politics work.

GeraldMonroe Dec 13, 2012, 11:54 PM
20 points
on: Bad news for uploading
As in, the number and type of neurotransmitter receptors embedded in each synapse.

This isn’t “disappointing”, this was expected. The initial wiring layout is random, though there’s some pruning that occurs in early brain development.

GeraldMonroe Dec 7, 2012, 1:21 AM
6 points
in reply to: Alicorn’s comment on: Mini advent calendar of Xrisks: Pandemics
This isn’t true. Viruses are subject to evolutionary pressure even inside a single patient. They don’t replicate perfectly (partly because they have to be small and simple, and don’t have very good control of the cellular environment they are inside, being invaders and all) and so variants of the particle compete with one another. Because of this, features that might be desired in a bioweapon but are not needed in order for the virus to replicate can get lost.

For instance, a bioweapon virus might contain genes for botulism toxin in order to kill the host. However, copying this gene every generation would diminish the particles ability to replicate, and so variants of the particle that are missing the gene would have a small evolutionary advantage. After just a few patients, the wild version of the virus might have lost this feature.

GeraldMonroe Dec 7, 2012, 1:12 AM
4 points
in reply to: FiftyTwo’s comment on: Mini advent calendar of Xrisks: Pandemics
The latter. I’ve read of limited successes in other fields of research (no one is publicly trying to make something like this) that indicate it’s just barely possible, maybe, with some luck.

One nasty thing is that the virus doesn’t have to be safe. It just has to work, and it’s not a problem if it permanently damages the people it doesn’t kill. So, creating a weapon like this is fundamentally much easier than trying to create, say, a treatment for cancer using similar methods.

GeraldMonroe Dec 6, 2012, 10:05 PM
0 points
on: [SEQ RERUN] Whither Manufacturing?
There are advantages to local production. Every time a customer orders something (whether it be an individual or a company consuming resources), if instead of huge single purpose factories located at a few places in the world, you have general purpose fabrication plants located nearby, it greatly reduces the time lag between an order being placed and a product received.

No need to warehouse final products—you might produce “general purpose” subunits and stockpile those, and every time someone places an order, you assemble the desired final product and send a robotic delivery vehicle out to deliver it.

The advantage of local production is reduced time lag. It might be a matter of hours between someone placing an order and the freshly manufactured product arriving. Moreover, since “nanofabs” can produce a huge range of possibilities, someone could post a refined design for a product, presumably pass some kind of safety inspection, and the moment the product is approved for sale, it could be available everywhere, worldwide, that is near a nanofabrication plant.

Due to these pressures, one can imagine the tradeoffs working out to where maybe every small city has a nanofabrication plant or two, but people don’t have them in their garages or basements because of the licensing fees and regulations.

There’s another huge advantage here that is much more interesting. The whole concept of a mini-van sized machine that can produce almost anything, including parts to assemble a copy of itself, does a lot more than refine supply chains. You could start the process of converting the entire moon into useful products merely by launching a couple of Apollo sized landers loaded with the seed machinery. On a longer scale, it would make interstellar colonization practical. (since a starship merely needs to transport a minimum set of nanomachinery production equipment to get started, and a big enough library of things to be made)

And, you could escape an apocalypse by building a truly self-contained bunker, buried deep underground with a nano-machinery plant to produce everything you need.

GeraldMonroe Dec 6, 2012, 8:52 PM
7 points
in reply to: FiftyTwo’s comment on: Mini advent calendar of Xrisks: Pandemics
The theory goes : plagues that are especially deadly must spread through the body extremely quickly. Otherwise, they give the immune system time for the B cells to formulate an antibody. Yet, if the plague spreads quickly, it has a short incubation period, and it means that hosts will die before spreading it. Ebola is thought to fit in this part of the ecology, and this is one reason why the virus is rare.

A virus that spread itself like the flu but also killed like ebola would be pushed by evolution away from these properties because it would kill off it’s hosts too quickly.

Another factor is that some of the better viruses for evading the immune system (HIV) depend on being able to randomly recombine and change the pattern for their outer shells.

If you designed a virus that had a tough outer coating, targeted cells and receptors designed to kill the host, and had some kind of sophisticated clock mechanism to force a long incubation period, you would be forced to give it genes that would code for complex error correcting proteins so that each new generation of the virus would have a low chance of containing a mutation. This would in turn prevent it from evolving, allowing the immune system (and synthetic antibodies) to target it easily.

So, you’d have to deliberately make it able to adjust it’s own outer coat randomly, but not any other components.

Such a virus is not something evolution is likely to ever create (because for one, it would extinct it’s hosts, and for another, evolution doesn’t work like this. Evolution as an algorithm finds the highest point on the NEAREST hill in the solution space, not the peak of a theoretical mountain that towers over the solution space)

Net result : with very sophisticated bioscience, such a person killer that had overlapping qualities could be created. However, you are correct that there is a reason you don’t see them in nature.

GeraldMonroe Dec 4, 2012, 5:56 PM
6 points
on: Mini advent calendar of Xrisks: synthetic biology
An example of a nasty trick that would make for a relatively easy to produce and deploy bio-weapon : http://www.plospathogens.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.ppat.1001257

Inhaled prions have extremely long incubation times (years), so it would be possible for an attacker to expose huge numbers of people unknowingly to them. The disease it causes is slow and insidious, and as of today, there is no way to detect it until post-mortem. There’s no treatment, either. I’m not certain of the procedure for making prions in massive quantities in the laboratory, but since they are self-replicating if placed in a medium containing the respective protein, they probably could be mass-produced.

On the bright side, the disease would not be self-replicating in the wild, so it would not be an existential risk—merely a very nasty way to cause mass casualties. Also, this method has never been tested on humans, so it might not be very effective, so one can hope that terrorists will stick with bombs.

GeraldMonroe Oct 5, 2012, 4:08 AM
1 point
in reply to: HeatDeath’s comment on: [Link] The real end of science
Again, this is one of those approaches that sounds good at a conference, but when you actually sit there and think about it rationally, it shows it’s flaws.

Even if you know exactly what pathway to hit, a small molecule by definition will get everywhere and gum up the works for many, many other systems in the body. It’s almost impossible not to. Sure, there’s a tiny solution space of small molecules that are safe enough to use despite this, but even then you’re going to have side effects and you still have not fixed anything. The reason the cells are giving up and failing as a person ages is that their genetic code has reached a stage that calls for this. We’re still teasing out the exact regulatory mechanisms, but the evidence for this is overwhelming.

No small molecule can fix this problem. Say one of the side effects of this end of life regulatory status is that some cells have intracellular calcium levels that are too high, and another set has them too low. Tell me a small molecule exists out of the billions of possibilities that can fix this.

DNA patching and code update is something that would basically require Drexelerian nanorobotics, subject to the issues above.

Methods to “rollback” cells to their previous developmental states, then re-differentiate them to functional components for a laboratory grown replacement organ actually fix this problem.

For some reason, most of the resources (funding and people) is not pouring into rushing Drexelerian nanorobotics or replacement organs to the prototype stage.

GeraldMonroe Oct 4, 2012, 6:58 PM
2 points
in reply to: HeatDeath’s comment on: [Link] The real end of science
Meh, another buzzword. I actually don’t think we’ll see nanosurgery for a very long time, and we should be able to solve the problem of “death” many generations of tech before we can do nano-surgery.

Think about what you actually need to do this. You need a small robot, composed of non-biological parts at the nanoscale. Presumably, this would be diamondoid components such as motors, gears, bearings, etc as well as internal power storage, propulsion, sensors, and so on. The reason for non-biological parts is that biological parts are too floppy and unpredictable and are too difficult to rationally engineer into a working machine.

Anyways, this machine is very precisely made, probably manufactured in a perfect vacuum at low temperatures. Putting it into a dirty liquid environment will require many generations of engineering past the first generation of nanomachinery that can only function in a perfect vacuum at low temperatures. And it has to deal with power and communication issues.

Now, how does this machine actually repair anything? Perhaps it can clean up plaques in the arteries, but how does it fix the faulty DNA in damaged skin cells that cause the skin to sag with age? How does it enter a living cell without damaging it? How does it operate inside a living cell without getting shoved around away from where it needs to be? How do it’s sensors work in such a chaotic environment?

I’m not saying it can’t be done. In fact, I am pretty sure it can be done. I’m saying that this is a VERY VERY hard engineering problem, one that would require inconceivable amounts of effort. Using modern techniques this problem may in fact be so complex to solve that even if we had the information about biology and the nanoscale needed to even start on this project, it might be infeasible with modern resources.

If you have these machines, you have a machine that can create other nanomachines, with atomically precise components. Your machine probably needs a vacuum and low temperatures, as before. Well, that machine can probably make variants of itself that are far simpler to design than a biologically compatible repair robot. Say a variant that instead of performing additive manufacturing at the nanoscale, it can tear down an existing object at the nanoscale and inform the control machinery about the pattern it finds.

Anyways, long story short : with a lot less effort, the same technology needed for nanosurgery to be possible could deconstruct preserved human brains and build computers powerful enough to simulate these brains accurately and at high speed. This solves the problem of “death” quite neatly : rather than trying to patch up your decaying mass of biological tissue with nanosurgery, you get yourself preserved and converted into a computer simulation that does not decay at all.

GeraldMonroe Oct 4, 2012, 6:39 PM
3 points
in reply to: TimS’s comment on: [Link] The real end of science
The method I described WILL work. The laws of physics say it will. Small scale experiments show it working. It isn’t that complicated to understand. Bad mRNA present = cell dies. All tumors, no matter what, have bad mRNAs, wherever they happen to be found in the body.

But it has to be developed and refined, with huge resources put into each element of the problem.

Here, specifically, is the difference between my proposed method and the current ‘state of the art’. Ok, so the NIH holds a big meeting. They draw a massive flow chart. Team 1,2,3 - your expertise is in immunology. Find a coating that will evade the immune system and can encapsulate a large enough device. Million dollar prize to the first team that succeeds. Here are the specific criteria for success.

Team 4 - for some reason, health cells are dying when too many copies of the prototype device are injected. Million dollars if you can find a solution to this problem within 6 months.

Team 5 - we need alternate chemotherapy agents to attach to this device.

Team 6 - we need a manufacturing method.

Once a goal is identified and a team is assigned, they are allocated resources within a week. Rather than awarding and penny pinching funds, the overall effort has a huge budget and equipment is purchased or loaned between groups as needed. The teams would be working in massive integrated laboratories located across the country, with multiple teams in each laboratory for cross trading of skills and ideas.

And so on and so forth. The current model is “ok, so you want to research if near infrared lasers and tumor cells will work. You have this lengthy list of paper credentials, and lasers and cancer sound like buzzwords we like to hear. Also your buddies all rubber stamped your idea during review. Here’s your funds, hope to see a paper in 2 years”...

No one ever considers “how likely are actually going to be better than using high frequency radiation we already have? How much time is this really going to buy a patient even if this is a better method?”.

The fact is, I’ve looked at the list of all ongoing research at several major institutions, and they are usually nearly all projects of similarly questionable long term utility. Sure, maybe a miracle will happen and someone will discover and easy and cheap method that works incredibly well that no one ever thought would work.

But a molecular machine, composed of mostly organic protein based parts, that detects bad mRNAs and kills the cell is an idea that WILL work. It DOES work in rats. More importantly, it is a method that can potentially hunt down tumor cells of any type, no matter where they are hiding, no matter how many metastases are present.

Anyone using rational thought would realize that this is an idea that actually is nearly certain to work (well, in the long run, not saying a big research project might not hit a few showstoppers along the way).

And there is money going to this idea—but it’s having to compete with 1000 other methods that don’t have the potential to actually kill every tumor cell in a patient and cure them.

GeraldMonroe Oct 4, 2012, 1:37 AM
−2 points
on: The difficulty in predicting AI, in three lines
A working AI probably needs to duplicate thousands of individual systems found in the human mind. Whether we get there by scanning a brain for 4 years and 1 million electron beams working in parallel, or we have thousands of programming teams develop each subsystem, this is not going to be cheap.

You don’t get there by accident—evolution did it, but it took millions of years, with each subsystem being developed to build upon previous ones.

Have you heard anything about some massive corporation or government getting ready to drop a few tril on an all out effort?

No, and the current discussions are how there are not enough common resources to pay for current needs. There isn’t enough money to fund large militaries and to pay all of the expenses for the elderly and fix the roads and do everything else as it is. Money has to be borrowed from more successful economies, which just makes the fiscal crisis worse in the future.

Also, no corporation can justify spending more money than any company on the planet actually has to develop something that no one has ever done before and thus seems likely to fail.

Having read the brain emulation roadmap, and articles on how modern neural networks can model individual subsystems in the human mind successfully, this does not seem like a problem that we have to wait another 100 years to solve. The human race might be able to do it in 20 years if they started today and put the needed resources into the problem.

But it isn’t going to happen, and predictions of success can’t really be made until the actual process is actually started. It could be 10 years from now, it could be 200, before the actual effort is initiated. On the plus side, as time goes on, the cost to do this does go down to an extent. The total “bill of materials” for the hardware goes down with every year with Moore’s law. Better software techniques make it more likely that such a huge project could be developed and not be so buggy it wouldn’t run at all. But, in 30 years from now, it will still be a difficult and expensive endeavor needing a lot of resources.

GeraldMonroe Oct 4, 2012, 1:25 AM
8 points
in reply to: TimS’s comment on: [Link] The real end of science
You missed the boat completely. Not modding down because this is an easy cognitive error to make, and I just hit you with a wall of text that does need better editing.

I just said that the model of “basic research” is WRONG. You can’t throw billions at individual groups, each eating away a tiny piece of the puzzle doing basic research and expect to get a working device that fixes the real problems.

You’ll get rafts of “papers” that each try to inform the world about some tiny element about how things work, but fail miserably in their mission for a bunch of reasons.

Instead you need targeted, GOAL oriented research, and a game plan to win. When groups learn things, they need to update a wiki or some other information management tool with what they have found out and how certain they are correct—not hide their actual discovery in a huge jargon laden paper with 50 references at the end.

GeraldMonroe Oct 4, 2012, 1:14 AM
1 point
on: When does something stop being a “self-consistent idea” and become scientific fact?
George the Giant or invisible cosmic springs that are too small to ever measure? Also a bunch of extra spatial dimensions that information can travel through without us being to see it. I see what you did there.

Ultimately I’d say there is nothing wrong with the primitives thinking, as long as they are willing to upgrade their model as better evidence becomes available. When the primitives finally send someone to check the other side of the mountain and see no giant, they need to eventually assume that the cause must be somewhere else they cannot see, like under the ground.

Also, if they think of a simpler model RIGHT NOW that meets all the above restrictions, they should “upgrade” to that simpler model because it saves computational time to work with it.

When the primitives develop tools to actually see the ground moving, and find out it does this all the time, they have to upgrade their model further to realize that somehow earthquakes are a property of the ground itself.

And so on up to present, and possibly the future when we can model the entire earth as a series of potential energy reservoirs and predict precisely when stress levels are building to the point of an energy transfer occurring.

GeraldMonroe Oct 4, 2012, 12:45 AM
25 points
on: [Link] The real end of science
It’s easy to point fingers at a very sick subset of scientific endeavors—biomedical research. The reasons it is messed up and not very productive are myriad. Fake and non-reproducible results that waste everyone’s time are one facet of the problem. The big one I observed was that trying to make a useful tool to solve a real problem with the human body is NOT something that the traditional model can handle very well. The human body is so immensely complex. This means that “easy” solutions are not going to work. You can’t repair a jet engine by putting sawdust in the engine oil or some other cheap trick, can you? Why would you think a very small molecule that can interact with any one of tens of thousands of proteins in an unpredictable manner could fix anything either? (or a beam of radiation, or chopping out an entire sub-system and replacing it with a shoddy substitute made by cannibalizing something else, or delivering crude electric shocks to a huge region. I’ve just named nearly every trick in the arsenal)

Most biomedical research is slanted towards this “cheap trick” solution, however. The reason is because the model encourages it. University research teams usually consist of a principle investigator and a small cadre of graduate students, and a relatively small budget. They are under a deadline to come up with something-anything useful within a few years, and the failures don’t receive tenure and are fired. Pharmaceutical research teams also want a quick and cheap solution, generally, for a similar reason. Most of the low hanging fruit—small molecule drugs that are safe and effective—has already been plucked, and in any case there is a limit to the problems in biological systems that can actually be fixed with small molecules. If a complex machine is broken, you usually need to shut it off and replace major components. You are not going to be able to spray some magic oil and fix the fault.

For example, how might you plausible cure cancer? Well, what do cancer cells share in common? Markers on the outside of the cells? Nope, if there were, the immune system would usually detect them. Are the cells always making some foreign protein? Nope, same problem. All tumors share mutated genes, and thus have mRNAs present in the cells that you can detect.

So how might you exploit this? Somehow you have to build a tool that can get into cells near the tumor and detect the ones with these faulty mRNAs(and kills them). Also, this tool needs to not affect healthy cells.

If you break down the components of the tool, you realize it would have to be quite complex, with many sub-elements that have to be developed. You cannot solve this problem with 10 people and a few million dollars. You probably need many interrelated teams, all of whom are tasked with developing separate components of the tool. (with prizes if they succeed, and multiple teams working on each component using a different method to minimize risks)

No one is going to magically publish a working paper in Nature tomorrow where they have succeeded in such an effort overnight. Yet, this is basically what the current system expects. Somehow someone is going to cure cancer tomorrow without there being an actual integrated plan, with the billions of dollars in resources needed, and a sound game plan that minimizes risk and rewards individual successes.

Professors I have pointed this out to say that no central agency can possibly “know” what a successful cancer cure might look like. The current system just funds anyone who wants to try anything, assuming they pass review and have the right credentials. Thus a large variety of things are tried. I don’t see it. I don’t think there is a valid solution to cancer that can be found with a small team just trying things with a million or 2 of equipment, supplies, and personnel.

Growing replacement organs is a similar endeavor. Small teams have managed to show that it is viable—but they cannot actually solve the serious problems because they lack the resources to go about it in a systematic and likely to succeed way. While Wake Forest has demonstrated years ago that they can make a small heart that beats, there isn’t a huge team of thousands systematically attacking each element of the problem that has to be solved to make full scale replacement hearts.

One final note : this ultimately points to gross misapplication of resources. Our society spends billions to kill a few Muslims who MIGHT kill some people violently. It spends billions to incarcerate millions of people for life who individually MIGHT commit some murders. It spends billions on nursing homes and end of life care to statistically extend the lives of millions by a matter of months.

Yet real solutions to problems that kill nearly everyone, for certain, are not worth the money to solve them in a systematic way.

The reason for this is lack of rationality. Human beings fear emotionally extremely rare causes of death much more than extremely likely, “natural” causes. They fear the idea of a few disgruntled Muslims or a criminal who was let out of prison murdering them far more than they fear their heart suddenly failing or their tissues developing a tumor when they are old.

GeraldMonroe Oct 4, 2012, 12:21 AM
1 point
on: [Link] The real end of science
Won’t reality eventually sort this out?

Essentially what is being said here is that “the scientific establishment in the West (mostly the USA) is becoming dysfunctional. If the current trend continues, enough science will be wrong or fraudulent that no forward progress is made at all.”

However, science isn’t just an abstract idea with intangible moral rules. If scientists fake results on a large scale, they will cease discovering useful new ideas or create anything that is objectively better than what Western society currently has. This will have consequences as governed by the one entity that can’t be befuddled—the actual universe. Western machinery and medicine will become relatively less efficient compared to competitors because it does not keep getting improved. Over enough of a period of time, this will be deleterious to the entire civilization.

As long as their are competing civilizations (you can divide the world up into other sub-groups, although of course there are many inter-relationships) such as Eastern Europe, Asia, the South Americas, etc then over the long term (centuries) this will simply give these competing civilizations an opportunity to surge ahead. Overall global progress does not stop.

A broader theme here : I’m saying that from the very dawn of rational thought and the scientific method, combined with a method to record the progress made and prevent information loss (the printing press), the overall trajectory is unstoppable. Various human groups competing among each other will continue to increase their control over environment, ultimately resulting in the development of tools that allow true mastery. (AIs, nano-machinery that can self replicate and quickly pattern everything, etc)

It’s sort of a popular idea to talk about ways that this could somehow not happen, but short of a large scale erasure of existing information (aka nuclear weapons or very large meteors erasing the current “state” of the global information environment) it’s hard to see how anything else could ultimately happen.

GeraldMonroe Oct 3, 2012, 9:30 PM
1 point
in reply to: drnickbone’s comment on: Female Test Subject—Convince Me To Get Cryo
1. How, precisely, would this happen? We aren’t writing sci-fi here. There’s dozens of countries on this planet with world class R&D occurring each and every day. The key technology needed to revive frozen brains is the development of nanoscale machine tools that are versatile enough to aid in manufacturing more copies of themselves. This sort of technology would change many industries, and in the short term would give the developers of the tech (assuming they had some means of keeping control of it) enormous economic and military advantages.
  
  a. Economic—these tools would be cheap in mass quantities because they can be used to make themselves. Nearly any manufactured good made today could probably be duplicated, and it would not require the elaborate and complex manufacturing chains that it takes today. Also, the products would be very close to atomically perfect, so there would be little need for quality control. b. Military—high end weapons are some of the most expensive to manufacture products available, for a myriad of reasons. (I mean jets, drones, tanks, etc). Nanoscale printers would drop the price to rock bottom for each additional copy of a weapon.
A civilization armed with these tools of course would not be worried about resources or environmental damage.
a. There are a lot of resources not feasible today because we can’t manufacture mining robots at rock bottom prices and send them to go after these low yield resources. b. We suffer from a lack of energy because solar panels and high end batteries have high manufacturing costs. (the raw materials are mostly very cheap). Same goes for nuclear reactors.
c. We cannot reverse environmental damage because we cannot afford to manufacture square miles worth of machinery to reverse the damage. (mostly C02 and other greenhouse gas capturing plants, but also robots to clean up various messes)

I say we revive people as soon as possible as computer simulations to give us a form of friendly AI that we can more or less trust. These people could be emulated at high speed and duplicated many times and used to counter the other risks.

I agree with you entirely on the irreversible brain damage. I think this problem can be fixed with systematic efforts to solve it (and a legal work around or a change to the laws) but this requires resources that Alcor and CI lack at the moment.