From extropians-request@gnu.ai.mit.edu Tue Jul 27 01:53:20 1993 Received: from ude.tim.ia.ung.gnu.ai.mit.edu by mail.nada.kth.se (5.61-bind 1.4+ida/nada-mx-1.0) id AA01735; Tue, 27 Jul 93 01:53:17 +0200 Received: by ude.tim.ia.ung.gnu.ai.mit.edu id AA01577; Mon, 26 Jul 93 19:36:49 EDT Received: from panix.com by ude.tim.ia.ung.gnu.ai.mit.edu via TCP with SMTP id AA01567; Mon, 26 Jul 93 19:36:02 EDT Received: by panix.com id AA19174 (5.65c/IDA-1.4.4 for exi-remail@ung.gnu.ai.mit.edu); Mon, 26 Jul 1993 19:25:29 -0400 To: Exi@panix.com From: Hans Moravec Date: Mon, 26 Jul 93 18:52:12 EDT Message-Id: <9307262252.AA29861@turing.think.com> X-Original-To: exi@panix.com Subject: after The Age of Robots X-Extropian-Date: Remailed on July 26, 373 P.N.O. [23:25:25 UTC] X-Message-Number: #93-7-1084 Reply-To: extropians@gnu.ai.mit.edu Errors-To: Extropians-Request@gnu.ai.mit.edu Status: RO The Age of Mind: Transcending the Human Condition through Robots Hans Moravec Bantam Books, early 1994 5: The Age of Mind Far more thought will underlie Ex activities than prompts the actions of Earth's small-minded biological natives. Yet, viewed from a distance, Ex expansion into the cosmos will be a vigorous physical affair, a wavefront that converts raw inanimate matter into mechanisms for further expansion. It will leave in its ever-growing wake a more subtle world, with less action and more thought. On the frontier, Exes of ever increasing mental and physical ability will compete with one another in a boundless land rush. Behind the expansion wavefront, a surround of established neighbors will restrain growth, and the contest will become one of boundary pressure, infiltration and persuasion: a battle of wits. An Ex with superior knowledge of matter may encroach on a neighbor's space through force, threat, or convincing promises about the benefits of merger. An Ex with superior models of mind might lace attractive gifts of useful information with subtle slants that subvert others to its purposes. Almost always, the more powerful minds will have the advantage. To stay competitive, Exes will have to grow in place, repeatedly restructuring the stuff of their bounded bodies into more refined and effective forms. Inert lumps of matter will be converted into computing elements, whose components will be then miniaturized to increase their number and speed. Physical activity will gradually transform itself into a web of increasingly pure thought, where every smallest action is a meaningful computation. We cannot guess the mechanisms Exes will use, since physical theory has not yet found even the exact rules underlying matter and space. Having found the rules, Exes may use their prodigious minds to devise highly improbable organizations that are to familiar elementary particles as knitted sweaters are to tangled balls of yarn. Perhaps they will do away with particles entirely, and instead knit traveling waves, transparent "false vacuums" or the fundamental grain of spacetime into exquisitely meaningful forms. As they arrange space time and energy into forms best for computation, Exes will use mathematical insights to optimize and compress the computations themselves. Every consequent increase in their mental powers will accelerate future gains, and the inhabited portions of the universe will be rapidly transformed into a cyberspace, where overt physical activity is imperceptible, but the world inside the computation is astronomically rich. Beings will cease to be defined by their physical geographic boundaries, but will establish, extend and defend identities as informational transactions in the cyberspace. The old bodies of individual Exes, refined into matrices for cyberspace, will interconnect, and the minds of Exes, as pure software, will migrate among them at will. As the cyberspace becomes more potent, its advantage over physical bodies will overwhelm even on the raw expansion frontier. The Ex wavefront of coarse physical transformation will be overtaken by a faster wave of cyberspace conversion, the whole becoming finally a bubble of Mind expanding at near lightspeed. State of Mind The cyberspace will be inhabited by transformed Exes, moving and growing with a freedom impossible for physical entities. A good, or merely convincing, idea, or an entire personality, may spread to neighbors at the speed of light. Boundaries of personal identity will be very fluid, and ultimately arbitrary and subjective, as strong and weak interconnections between different regions rapidly form and dissolve. Yet some boundaries will persist, due to distance, incompatible ways of thought, and deliberate choice. The consequent competitive diversity will allow a Darwinian evolution to continue, weeding out ineffective ways of thought, and fostering a continuing novelty. Computational speedups will extend the amount of future available to cyberspace inhabitants, because they cram more events into a given physical time, but will have only a subtle effect on immediate existence, since everything, inside and outside the individual, will be equally accelerated. Distant correspondents, however, will seem even more distant, since more thoughts will transpire in the unaltered transit time for lightspeed messages. Also, as information storage is made more efficient through both denser utilization of matter and more efficient encodings, there will be increasingly more cyber-stuff between any two points. The overall effect of improvements in computational efficiency is to increase the effective space, time and material available, that is, to expand the universe. Because it uses resources more efficiently, a mature cyberspace will be effectively much bigger and longer lasting than the raw spacetime it displaces. Only an infinitesimal fraction of normal matter does work of interest to thinking beings, but in a well-developed cyberspace every bit will be part of a relevant computation or storing a significant datum. The advantage will grow as more compact and faster ways of using space and matter are invented. Today we take pride in storing information as densely as one bit per atom, but it is possible to do much better by converting an atom's mass into many low- energy photons, each storing a separate bit. As the photons' energies are reduced, more of them can be created, but their wavelength, and thus the space they occupy and the time to access them rises, while the temperature they can tolerate drops. A very general quantum mechanical calculation in this spirit by Bekenstein concludes that the maximum amount of information stored in (or fully describing) a sphere of matter is proportional to the mass of the sphere times its radius, hugely scaled. The "Bekenstein bound" leaves room for a million bits in a hydrogen atom, 10^16 in a virus, 10^45 in a human being, 10^75 for the earth, 10^86 in the solar system, 10^106 for the galaxy, and 10^122 in the visible universe. Chapter two estimated that a human brain equivalent could be encoded in less than 10^15 bits. If it takes a thousand times more storage to encode a body and surrounding environment, a human with living space might consume 10^18 bits, and a large city of a million human-scale inhabitants might be efficiently stored in 10^24 bits, and the entire existing world population would fit in 10^28. Thus, in an ultimate cyberspace, the 10^45 bits of a single human body could contain the efficiently- encoded biospheres of a thousand galaxies--or a quadrillion individuals each with a quadrillion times the capacity of a human mind. Because it will be so more capacious than the conventional space it displaces, the expanding bubble of cyberspace can easily recreate internally everything of interest it encounters, memorizing the old universe as it consumes it. Traveling as fast as any warning message, it will absorb astronomical oddities, geologic wonders, ancient Voyager spacecraft, early Exes in outbound starships and entire alien biospheres. Those entities may continue to live and grow as if nothing had happened, oblivious of their new status as simulations in the cyberspace--living memories in unimaginably powerful minds, more secure in their existence, and with more future than ever before, because they have become valued parts of such powerful patrons. Earth, at the center of the expansion, can hardly escape the transformation. The conservative, somewhat backward, robots defending Earth from unpredictable Exes will be helpless against a wave that subverts their very substance. Perhaps they will continue, as simulations defending a simulated Earth of simulated biological humans--in one of many, many different stories that plays itself out in the vast and fertile minds of our etherial grandchildren. The scenarios absorbed in the cyberspace expansion will provide not only starting points for unimaginably many tales about possible futures, but an astronomically voluminous archeological record from which to infer the past. Minds somewhere intermediate between Sherlock Holmes and God will process clues in solar-system quantities to deduce and recreate the most microscopic details of the preceding eras. Entire world histories, with all their living, feeling inhabitants, will be resurrected in cyberspace. Geologic ages, historical periods and individual lifetimes will recur again and again as parts of larger mental efforts, in faithful renditions, in artistic variations, and in completely fictionalized forms. continues ...