Re: Apple II: Second Best Tech Product of All Time!

In article <1eqdnRePBPfcErvbnZ2dnUVZ_qSrnZ2d@xxxxxxxxxxx>,
Michael J. Mahon <mjmahon@xxxxxxx> wrote:
Paul Schlyter wrote:
In article <Ks6dndJ2H5OaxrnbnZ2dnUVZ_rylnZ2d@xxxxxxxxxxx>,
Michael J. Mahon <mjmahon@xxxxxxx> wrote:

.........................

So to you, "life" is something different from "biology"? The very
word "biology" is derived from "bios", which is Latin for "life"... ;-)

If life can occur on some chemical platform other than the carbon
based organical molecules here on Earth, that life would surely form a
biology too!!!

The only biology that we currently know is based on organic chemistry.
The point I was trying to make is that inorganic "biologies" may also
exist. I was contrasting inorganic life with organic life--sorry for
using the terms confusingly.

To me, the terms "life", "biology" and "organic" are very much
overlapping. To talk about "inorganic life" is IMO like talking
about, say "nonphysical mechanics". If we would create an electronic
machine which for all reasonable and practical purposes would be a
living creature, then I think we'd also see a new scientific
discipline which might be called e.g. "organic electronics".

True. And speed is not an issue when one judges whether a process
is mechanical or not. Consider e.g. celestial mechanics, where a
celestial body in the outer solar system may need centuries or more
to complete one revolution in its orbit. Bioligical electricity,
or mechanics if you so like, is much faster than that.

The point here is not "mechanism", but the possiblity of faster
and less massive substrates for intelligence than biology.

Earth's biology surely contains less massive substrates - ever
heard about microbiology? Although a biological cell is some 10
times larger than our smalles transistors, it can perform much
more complex operations than those 1000 or so transistors which
we might cram into the same volume as a call.

Much of the cell's mechanism is devoted to homeostasis of a complex
organic structure. Inorganic structures would require much less
"maintenance" (though power distribution and cooling must still be
addressed).

If a lifelike inorganic structure based on electronics in
superconductors would appear, the power distribution and colling
issues would be greatly reduced. The late swedish astronomer and
novel writer Peter Nilson actually speculated along these possibilities
in one of his sci-fi novels. If such an organism would ever become
warmer than not many degrees above absolute zero (so superconduction
would break down), it would probably die.

It is a reasonable assumption that intelligence requires a critical
number of "neurons", gates, logic functions, or whatever. These
can be realized with what used to be considered great density in
biological systems. But we are now on the threshold of creating
substrates for logic and computation that have many more elements
than brain tissue per unit of weight and power.

If so, we must already today be able to create substrates for logic
and computation that have somewhat more (i.e. not "many more")
elements than brain tissue per unit of weight and power. Can you
give a concrete example of such a project which ha ssucceeded?
And do you by "brain tissue" mean the brain of a human? Or of a rat
or other small mammal? Or of a crocodile or other big reptile or
fish?

Our logical substrates today are primarily two-dimensional. Moving
them into three dimensions with good volumetric density is progressing,
but has far to go. Another few decades should be more than enough time.

Only the future can tell if those decades are enough time or not. And
going from 2D to 3D in electronics will make the cooling problem much
more severe, and make cooling with liquids necessary.

There is every reason to believe that we can build things on purpose
that significantly surpass what has evolved biologically--it's just a
small matter of engineering. ;-) We can get it done in a lot less
time, too. ;-)

How soon do you think this will happen? Ten years? One year? One
month? Less?` ;-)

I meant a lot less than the millions of years taken by biology. ;-)

Biology did need much longer than just some millions of years..... ;-)

The Soviet biologist Lysenko believed that did actually happen, and claimed
that if the parents learnt some new skills, then their children would
inherit those skills....

Btw, learning has one advantage over genetic heritage: learning is
much faster, and learning can be changed much quicker to adapt to
changes in our environment. One generation is enough to give a
different focus in learning - many more generations are needed to
significantly alter the genetic heritage.

So there is at least a huge speed advantage if parents can pass the
whole corpus of their experience to their offspring.

Reminds me of the 50-year-old who says, "Ah, if I could be 20 again,
knowing what I know now..."

If so, he could apply for those jobs where the employer asks for people
no more than 25 years old, but despite that having 30+ years of experience
in the field.... <g>

Such an "experience cloning" reproductive strategy would essentially
dispense with "childhood" from an intellectual point of view, but
might saddle the offspring with all the perceived limitations of
their parents. Perhaps it would be necessary to keep "generational
tags" on all "learning".

People have long dreamt about shortcuts past the efforts needed for
learning. E.g. by playing an audio tape with a course in a new language
you wish to learn all through the night while you're sleeping.....

Physical replication is not a theoretical problem, and it can exist
whenever we are willing to make it exist. The first cases will be
expensive, though. ;-)

Willingness isn't enough for this - you also need sufficient skill
and resources.

I think the skill is inevitable, and the resources come down to
"will" to do it. But to create artifical life would be a huge
scientific accomplishment, so the motivation is very great.


..... i.e. you think we already have the resources?

I think that we have all the needed materials and equipment--we
lack only the specific knowledge to do the "assembly"--and that
is coming quickly.

We certainly have the raw materials.... just like people of the stone
age had the materials needed to build modern electronics: there's a
lot of silicon in our rocks....

Yes, that is what I meant. I'm concerned about how future humans
who must start over might bootstrap themselves back to a technological
civilization.

Presumably in a way similar to our ancestors.... if it's been done once,
it can be repeated.

But we have gone pretty far in using up the resources readily available
to budding technologies--the "low hanging fruit".

While our ancestors climbed up a relatively gentle stairway, any future
crop will have a lot of "big steps" to get over.

The biggest problem is the big population in the world. Our ancestors
were far fewer than we are....

If mold forms a "colony" on e.g. an apple, it grows and spreads all over
the apple. Sooner or later, the apple will be all consumed - and when
that happens, the mold colony dies. It remains to be seen whether the
human population as a whole is more intelligent than a mold colony or not.

And its clear that I identify with our technological civilization--I
have great hopes for it. ;-)

We'll have to find a way of living where we don't demand ever-increasing
available resources though ---- that's our biggest problem.

Or a way of living where there is a constantly increasing supply of
resources. The supply can be increased either by improved technology
(for extraction or synthesis) or by acquiring additional (off-planet)
resources.

That would buy us some more time but won't work in the long run.

Today we use perhaps some 10 times more energy than our ancestors some
4 generations ago. 4 generations is 100 years. If we want to increase
that energy consumption indefinitely at the same relative rate, we'll
need an Earth-like planet near every star in our galaxy in only some
1000 or so years! This assumes we're right now taking out as much energy
from the Earth as we can. In some 2000 years we would need an Earth-like
planet near every star in every galaxy we are able to observe.

Perhaps we can extract 10 times more energy from the Earth than we do
today? That'll buy us another 100 years. If we can extract 100 times
more, that'll buy us another 200 years, 1000 times another 300 years,
2000 times another 400 years -- etc etc etc.

Now, let's move in the realm of science fiction: suppose we somehow
learnt to use all the power output from the Sun for our own purposes.
If our energy demands increases by a factor of 10 every century, then
in only some 1400 years we would consume all the energy produced by
the Sun. And in some 2400 years we would want to consume the total
output from every star in our galaxy. And, finally, in some 3400
years we would want to consume the total stellar energy produced
within the observable universe!

There's much talk about "dark matter" and "dark energy" nowadays.
Suppose the "dark energy" was some 1000 times larger than the visible
energi, and suppose we would be able to use that energy too for our
purposes. How much more time would that buy us? Just another 300
years....

And how much energy would we want to consume in 10,000 years? A
million years?

As you can see, if we continue our ever increasing demands for energy
at the same rate as today, we'll become ecological monsters. We won't
be able to do that for very long -- in only a few thousand years, we
would demand all energy produced in the universe. A few thousand
years may seem like a very long time from our every day perspective,
but from an astronomical or geological perspective, a few thousand
years is just "a blink of an eye".

Therefore, our increasing demands for more energy at the current rate
cannot continue for very long, not even by "improved technology" or
"off-planet resources" combined! There simply isn't enough energy in
the universe for our demands in just a few millennia, if we continue our
exponential growth in energy consumption at today's rate. So at some
point, we must stop doing that. And we will be forced to do it if
we don't do it willingly.


Humans have large components not based on logic.... emotions are
important too.

Agreed. Emotions are definitely a two-edged sword, though. It will
be interesting to see how much of what emotions should be designed
into future intelligent beings.

Are you proposing the theory of "intelligent design" here? ;-)

Most cryptographical challenges are made difficult by the scarcity
of similarly encoded ciphertext. Having "gobs" of ciphertext that
is simply encoded makes this much easier than it might seem. Numbers
usually emerge first, then nouns, then verbs, etc., etc.


So it's then just due to human clumsiness, or laziness, taht there still
are many old dead languages we've failed to decipher?

In many cases, it's a consequence of having a very small
corpus of documents to decipher. A related problem is having
a relatively large corpus of very similar documents, so that
it's hard to get beyond their very limited "universe of discourse".

In other cases, it may simply be lack of sufficient interest... ;-)
If even a hundred capable researchers tackled one of these languages,
it would almost certainly either be deciphered or proven to be an
insufficient "basis set" for unambiguous deciphering.

That's probably a matter of funding.... you cannot do this as a hobby
if you want to be efficient. OK, if you're wealthy, you might - but
then you could just as well fund someone else to do it - someone who
is more skilled than you.

I think of intelligence as a normal, not an extraordinary, tendency
of evolution in a variable enviroment. Changing conditions makes
greater adaptability and learning capability a big survival advantage.

And when multiple organisms began to develop "crafty" adaptability,
then higher-order, reflective and planning intelligence became an
advantage.

None of this seems extraordinary. I would be surprised it it were
not a common tendency of life forced by a changing environment.

If so, why weren't there species with human-like intelligence during
a much larger part of the Earth's past natural history? Why don't we
find e.g. artefacts hundreds of millions of years old, made by
intelligent dinosaurs or insects?

Evolution is random, so it took several tries to get intelligence to
current levels. The change that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs
was a big step in that direction, as it happens.

The total elapsed time from single-celled life to intelligent life
was pretty long. The time from mammals to intelligent life was short
on that timescale.

Unfortunately, intelligence has not *yet* made us any less vulnerable
to the same mechanism that eliminated the dinosaurs.

We need to fix that.

People are working in that, by cataloging all the NEO's which may pose
a threat to us.


The mechanisms involved here are too complex to be modelled in
a common "responsibility model".

I wasn't speaking in terms of a "responsibility model". I simply
meant that we can now do something about it, and if we don't, then
we have chosen the consequences by our inaction.


The problem is that whatever actions we choose (including the
alternative "no action"), we cannot fully predict the consequences of
our choice of actions. So whatever we choose, we don't really know
what wedve chosen until afterwards. It's a bit like a lottery.

I understand.

But responsibility doesn't just mean making one choice and "taking
our hands off the wheel". It means continually observing and
correcting, so that undesired divergence is avoided. Of course,
this is not guaranteed to be successful, so we have to keep getting
better at it to improve our odds.

A good part of that is gaining a good enough understanding of
what's going on that we can construct useful models to predict the
outcome of our actions.


Btw, if you're serious about what you said earlier: "But it is a
*fact* that we are now responsible for our evolution", what do you
think we should do to significantly improve our gene pool? Kill off
those who have genetic defects? We do that to our pets, our
cattle and our crop....

I wasn't primarily talking about our natural biological evolution.
In fact, our present courses of action tend in the opposite direction
to "survival of the fittest"--I'm thinking of various medical
interventions that allow genes for diseases to propagate.

I think we are far better served by learning to fix such problems in
the genome by artificial means than by "pruning" individuals. (Though
there are some cases now, in view of a fuller understanding of the
genome, where individuals are guiding their own reproductive choices
to reduce the liklihood of future problems.)


Why do you require that the beavers should copy our designs? Wouldn't
it be more creative of them to invent a wireless network of their own?
It needn't work on radio waves, any wireless communication would do ;-)

Apparently I need a lesson in how to make a joke... ;-)

....or maybe I'm just amusing myself by taking your jokes seriously.... ;-)

Btw we humans, as well as many animals, have had wireless communication
for ages -- it's called speech/hearing and vision..... ;-)

Indeed--and it was such a huge leap forward that ears and eyes
have been "independently discovered" many times by evolution,
and pattern recognizing the time series and spatial data has given
rise to large brains, some structures of which were repurposed!

In one respect humans are quite underdeveloped though: smell. Many
other animals are much better than we at smelling.

--
----------------------------------------------------------------
Paul Schlyter, Grev Turegatan 40, SE-114 38 Stockholm, SWEDEN
e-mail: pausch at stockholm dot bostream dot se
WWW: http://stjarnhimlen.se/
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