RE: The purpose of human life is probably to create "Artificial General Intelligence"
January 12, 2018 at 4:30 pm
(This post was last modified: January 12, 2018 at 4:36 pm by I_am_not_mafia.)
I think the OP is on the right track here and I partially agree but I think there are terms here with baggage which are a sticking point.
The purpose of a ball isn't to roll down a hill, it just does it given the right conditions. Life is the same. It's like water trickling through and finding the path of least resistance to spreading out· You could call it a search, and while it effectively is, describing it as so carries the danger of suggesting purpose.
Whether AGI is what we'll end up with depends on whether we can create it efficiently enough. If it takes the power consumption of a small city to create the full computational complexity of a dog then we won't have AGI. It would be more efficient to grow real brains and manipulate those instead. A human brain runs on roughly 100 watts and occupies a space slightly smaller than your head oddly enough. It's quite possible that the AI of the future will be grown for this very reason.
But we do see a development of complexity over time as the energy from the sun gets harnessed and used in ever increasingly efficient ways. The recent advances in automation is a continuation of this process. It allows us to manufacture things more efficiently, to make more use of the free energy at our disposal, that is energy that can perform work. The whole point of AI, even narrow AI is to act more intelligently and not to require as much micro-managing as an explicit computer program that is too fragile to work in a noisy environment. The phrase Artificial General Intelligence is recognition that narrow AI is only a step up from a normal computer program. If we can create AGI then it would definitely aid in automation. But more than that, it would allow us to send robots beyond Earth's gravity well to exploit untapped reserves of energy and resources as the ones on Earth become depleted. If we can't find a way for humans to happily and safely exist permanently in space then AGI may be the only way that we can continue to make progress as a civilisation.
This is especially important when you consider that we need to export our entropy. Religionists argue that life violates the second law of thermodynamics. They are wrong. What they don't understand is that order can be created locally as long as disorder is increased globally by doing so. The problem is that we're trying to bring order to the entire world when there are fewer places left for our pollution to go. If we can send robots out to exploit the solar system then it becomes much easier to look after the world that we have. For example, no one would dream of drilling for oil in a beautiful wilderness or fracking under our houses if robots were sending back materials that had been mined and refined in space with all the pollution left there.
So for me, the creation of AGI might be what saves civilisation if space is too much of a hostile environment for us to permanently exist there. Or it might be a vital step to allow us to make the transition as entire asteroids get mined out to provide shielding from the radiation or space bases get built before humans arrive.
The problem is that creating AGI is extremely difficult and time is quickly running out. We're facing the long emergency where many exponential curves are coinciding. Our resources are running out while demand for them is rising. And all the while pollution is increasing too. We live in an economic system where anything less than continued exponential growth is seen as something to be avoided at all costs.
The purpose of a ball isn't to roll down a hill, it just does it given the right conditions. Life is the same. It's like water trickling through and finding the path of least resistance to spreading out· You could call it a search, and while it effectively is, describing it as so carries the danger of suggesting purpose.
Whether AGI is what we'll end up with depends on whether we can create it efficiently enough. If it takes the power consumption of a small city to create the full computational complexity of a dog then we won't have AGI. It would be more efficient to grow real brains and manipulate those instead. A human brain runs on roughly 100 watts and occupies a space slightly smaller than your head oddly enough. It's quite possible that the AI of the future will be grown for this very reason.
But we do see a development of complexity over time as the energy from the sun gets harnessed and used in ever increasingly efficient ways. The recent advances in automation is a continuation of this process. It allows us to manufacture things more efficiently, to make more use of the free energy at our disposal, that is energy that can perform work. The whole point of AI, even narrow AI is to act more intelligently and not to require as much micro-managing as an explicit computer program that is too fragile to work in a noisy environment. The phrase Artificial General Intelligence is recognition that narrow AI is only a step up from a normal computer program. If we can create AGI then it would definitely aid in automation. But more than that, it would allow us to send robots beyond Earth's gravity well to exploit untapped reserves of energy and resources as the ones on Earth become depleted. If we can't find a way for humans to happily and safely exist permanently in space then AGI may be the only way that we can continue to make progress as a civilisation.
This is especially important when you consider that we need to export our entropy. Religionists argue that life violates the second law of thermodynamics. They are wrong. What they don't understand is that order can be created locally as long as disorder is increased globally by doing so. The problem is that we're trying to bring order to the entire world when there are fewer places left for our pollution to go. If we can send robots out to exploit the solar system then it becomes much easier to look after the world that we have. For example, no one would dream of drilling for oil in a beautiful wilderness or fracking under our houses if robots were sending back materials that had been mined and refined in space with all the pollution left there.
So for me, the creation of AGI might be what saves civilisation if space is too much of a hostile environment for us to permanently exist there. Or it might be a vital step to allow us to make the transition as entire asteroids get mined out to provide shielding from the radiation or space bases get built before humans arrive.
The problem is that creating AGI is extremely difficult and time is quickly running out. We're facing the long emergency where many exponential curves are coinciding. Our resources are running out while demand for them is rising. And all the while pollution is increasing too. We live in an economic system where anything less than continued exponential growth is seen as something to be avoided at all costs.
