Speeding up space coloniization

'Combs, Mike' mikecombs@... [spacesettlers] wrote:

> It shouldnt be surprising to anyone that AI would excel at Chess or Go,
> as those are games of logic. Where AI lags behind the SF fantasy is in
> the area of a machine reasoning as a human does, and able to grapple
> with the messy world as it is, without help.

I'm not sure that human reasoning is all that. Most of what our brain
does is (1) pattern recognition and (2) prediction (based on recognized
patterns).

These are areas where AI has generally been weak, until recently.

Our ability to actually reason carefully is much like our ability at
Chess -- something that comes only through training, and reducing our
highly parallel, "intuitive" (i.e. pattern-recognition based) thought
processes with slow, sequential logical processes. On the whole, we
suck at that.

All of which is a bit of a digression, but it's an area that interests
me intensely, so I had to jump in. :) We're certainly palpably closer
to human-level AI now than we were ten years ago. When will we cross
the threshold, with all the pieces be put together in one machine?
Nobody can say for sure, but I'd be greatly surprised if it's more than
30 years from now, or less than 5.

> So I dont think we would be
> destroyed, but we might well be out-competed. And if we continue to be
> slow in our progress toward space settlement, we might come to regret a
> tomorrow where machine intelligences inhabit the entirety of the solar
> system while we continue to be stuck on Earth. Nothing would make us
> feel more left in their dust than Earth being thought of as the human
> reservation, I would think.

That's a chillingly plausible story. We need only to assume a small set
of very reasonable things:

1. Intelligent machines are no less moral than intelligent humans.
2. So, they see the value in biological life and want to preserve it.
3. They also observe that biological critters (such as us) need a
biosphere -- which exists only on Earth.
4. THEY don't need a biosphere. In fact their lives are much easier
without one.

So, they move offworld, declare the Earth a nature preserve, and build
their own dwellings throughout the solar system in forms that are
completely alien (and inhospitable) to us.

I don't think we'd be technically imprisoned in this scenario -- but
they might develop so much faster than we do that by the time we get out
there, all the resources are already claimed. That would effectively
halt human expansion (although, Fermi would note, not the expansion of
civilization, which would continue via the machines).

So, yeah. Maybe we'd better pick up the pace a bit.