Re: Existential risks

Tim Tyler <seemysig@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Vend wrote:
On 26 Apr, 09:21, Tim Tyler <seemy...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Resource depletion? But the planet is enormous - and we
have only just begun to scratch its surface.

And below this surface is all rocks for which our current technology
has no use.

Miners seem to tell a rather different story.
Past meteorite impacts are involved, I understand.

And E=mc^2, and 'c' is enormous - so gigantic energies can be
created simply by smashing atoms together.

If you are referring to nuclear fusion, it doesn't seem that we are
going to make it an usable energy source anytime soon.

There is no shortage of coal - and there's a huge natural
fusion reactor nearby. So, there's no great hurry.
Meanwhile, progress continues: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER

The prime resources needed are raw material and energy. With all the raw
material on the earth, and a constant flow of energy from the sun, things
can keep going for a very very long time.

We don't actually use up anything. We just transform it to other forms.
And with energy, you can in theory transform it back to what it was.

At worse, what will happen is that the current flow of energy and cheap
pre-made materials will slow as all the "free" stuff is used up, and we
have to use energy to recycle materials into the forms we need. The net
result is that we will find more ways to make things last longer and throw
less stuff away since the material to make new things will cost so much
more than it does now.

But that assumes we don't find cheaper higher power energy sources like
fusion or find new ways to get more energy from the sun such as huge solar
collectors in space that send the energy back to earth somehow (like with
microwaves). With large amounts of cheap energy, and lots of AI machines
to do things for us, we can build huge material recycling stations where
old just goes in and new stuff comes out.

On questions like pollution, we will have the technology to address and
control such problems. Either we will develop technology's to prevent it,
or we will develop technologies to counteract it - like building huge CO2
scrubbers to keep the CO2 levels in check if that is needed. It could be
that in time, the entire earth will become one huge metropolitan area -
one huge city.

The only real question is what forms will survive to be a part of it.

I don't have as much faith as Tim seems to in the idea of AI becoming the
dominate life form any time soon. I see no motivation for a smart robot to
want to reproduce, or to build other robots that want to reproduce.

Why would man want to build robots that would want to steal resources away
from us by motivating them to want to survive and reproduce? It's as
stupid an idea as trying to build a machine to dril for oil and burn it up
when it found it. What on earth would motivate us to build machines to
consume our energy and raw material without producing something we wanted
as a side effect?

If any such machine was created, and started to reproduce and steal energy
and raw material, we would treat it _exactly_ like we treat a fire -
something that was of the highest priority to stop.

Any AI which doesn't continue to serve man's needs, will be seen as a
threat and eliminated. No sane person will build a machine that will kill
them, and a self reproducing resource stealing AI will kill us. The sane
people of the world will do whatever it takes to protect themselves from
the insane people who build such machines and from the accidents that might
happen where something thought to be good turns bad.

I could agree to an argument that it's inevitable that life forms very
different from man may inherit the earth at some distant point in the
future. But it's hard for me to accept the idea that it will happen any
time soon. Strong AI I believe will happen soon, but man won't be replaced
any time soon. Who knows how we will evolve with the help of advancements
in technology and genetics, but whatever we evolove into is what will most
likely inherit the earth.

--
Curt Welch http://CurtWelch.Com/
curt@xxxxxxxx http://NewsReader.Com/
.

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