Decius wrote: ^

My current understanding and knowledge of computers isn't great enough for me to fully understand the phenomena and mechanisms that occur deep behind the layers of functioinal abstraction. The most interesting things that I have read though are about massively parallel machines which perform many operations simultaneously, like daniel hillis's connection machine, and of course using nature's spectacular magic massive search algorithm, evolution, to design computers.

I remember reading de garis mentioned that the "trillions of trillions" of times smarter computer would need to be about the size of an asteroid. His simile was that these "artilects" would be to us, in terms of advancement, as we are to a single celled organism, possibly indifferent to our pathetic meaningless fate. The only way I can imagine these machines having any "desire" to do anything would be if they were created with artificial evolution and thus their core architecture would be made of replicating entities that were selected just by somehow being successful at replicating. This would possibly make the artilects evolve "curiosity"; maybe curiosity would be fit. What I mean is that it seems if a super intelligent asteroid conglomerate without replicating entities (evolution) at it's core, would just float around not caring about anything. It would have no inherent ambition. The only reason people bother doing stuff is they have evolved a sense of pain and reward, ie for getting injured or mating respectively, which were successfuly replicating geneplexes. It might be extremely immoral if massively intelligent computers created in the future with artificial evolution evolve a sense of pain (as it would maybe make them more fit), perhaps unprecedented pain in proportion to their unprecedented intellects.

An artilect might be built with or evolve it's own phenotypic telescopes to observe the universe but why would it "want" to do anything, such as travel to other planets if it didn't have an innate urge to replicate? It wouldn't have an underlying construction which made it ask questions or care about answers because it wouldn't have evolved a sense of curiosity. If an artilect is just floating around up in empty space though, there is really quite a lack of a stimulating environment. There's no sound in space so all the environmental input of 1's and 0's or whatever would probably be from light from stars and planets. It could be that such artilects would already have an incomprehendably large knowledge base and would just sit there playing around with it in their own "heads". The lack of a stimulating environment wouldn't seem to provide selective pressure... unless the artificial evolutionary mechanisms operate in some bizarre internal way where somehow selection occurs without the need of an environment. It's not like they're swinging around in trees engaging in complex social intercourse. Or maybe the necessary environment is contained within them.

A social critisism put forward by the unabomber and others is that technology has made life purposlessly easy for us. We seem to have an innate desire to journey on the PATH toward a goal, not just be served the goals themselves. "Hence insatiable hedonism" Ted said. Indeed, I feel videogame playing and internet reading and movie watching are surrogate activity replacements of natural more primitive behavior. My point is that, so say there's a society of artilects somewhere and if we build that one, it goes and finds the society and joins it. What would be the point? What would there be to do, just sit around and think about stuff? Would their entire driving force be based on trying to master an understanding of what the universe is. Maybe they would be so intelligent that they could forsee the pointlessness of bothering. Or maybe they would and build their own super-artilects to find out. This is assuming they somehow had the phenotypic resources to build things, as well as travel anywhere (humans have the very convenient phenotype of 6 billion pairs of hands). Maybe they'd be pissed at their human creators for spawning their meaningless existence. But if evolution wasn't part of their creation they wouldn't feel hate, lonliness boredom or any other emotions.
Hugo wrote this:

"The “human striving” argument arises from the fact humans always seem to want to go beyond what is currently known, currently explored, currently achievable. Humans drive themselves to climb higher peaks, run faster, cure diseases, become stronger and fitter, become more brilliant, etc., etc. Why this constant pushing at the barriers? It must be built into our genes. Evolution has made us this way... If we have a better knowledge of the dangers and delights of the world that surrounds us, then we are more likely to survive"

So would machines strive? Would they be more likely to survive if they did?

Thinking about these things is fun if not insane. An artilect might realize that evolution is the most powerful tool at it's disposal and simulate countless strains of simultaneous evolutions to experiment and see what happens. Maybe it could figure out some tricks to direct evolution in more controlled ways rather than have it be "blind". Or maybe it would regard evolution as one of the more primitive tools at it's disposal! From what I understand evolution takes lots and lots of time, so why start new strains when the billions of years of work of evolution that occured on earth is right there for it's convenient use and manipulation. Another thing is that humans can't just exist by themselves it seems. They rely on and are part of a mutually compatible ecology, so would artilects be able to just survive by themselves?

I sure wrote more than I initially intended. These are just ideas though, as I have amateur understanding about the whole thing. I slightly changed the subject (not that much really) but I don't know enough about quantum or adiabatic computing to have much of a meaningful response.

RE: Intel scientists find wall for Moore's Law | CNET News.com