Apotheosis and the singularity...
During the millennium media frenzy, you've probably
heard about something called "molecular
nanotechnology". Molecular nanotechnology is the
dream of devices built out of individual atoms -
devices that are actually custom-designed molecules.
It's the dream of infinitesimal robots, "assemblers",
capable of building arbitrary configurations of
matter, atom by atom - including more assemblers. You
only need to build one general assembler, and then in
an hour there are two assemblers, and in another hour
there are four assemblers. Fifty hours and a few tons
of raw material later you have a quadrillion
assemblers. (4)! Once you have your bucket of
assemblers, you can give them molecular blueprints and
tell them to build literally anything - cars, houses,
spaceships built from diamond and sapphire; bread,
clothing, beef Wellington... Or make changes to
existing structures; remove arterial plaque, destroy
cancerous cells, repair broken spinal cords,
regenerate missing legs, cure old age...
I am not a nanotechnology fan. I don't think the
human species has enough intelligence to handle that
kind of power. That's why I'm an advocate of
intelligence enhancement. But unless you've heard of
nanotechnology, it's hard to appreciate the magnitude
of the changes we're talking about. Total control of
the material world at the molecular level is what the
conservatives in the futurism business are predicting.
Material utopias and wish fulfillment - biological
immortality, three-dimensional Xerox machines, free
food, instant-mansions-just-add-water, and so on - are
a wimpy use of a technology that could rewrite the
entire planet on the molecular level, including the
substrate of our own brains. The human brain contains
a hundred billion neurons, interconnected with a
hundred trillion synapses, along which impulses flash
at the blinding speed of... 100 meters per second.
Tops.
If we could reconfigure our neurons and upgrade the
signal propagation speed to around, say, a third of
the speed of light, or 100,000,000 meters per second,
the result would be a factor-of-one-million speedup in
thought. At this rate, one subjective year would pass
every 31 physical seconds (5). Transforming an
existing human would be a bit more work, but it could
be done (6). Of course, you'd probably go nuts from
sensory deprivation - your body would only send you
half a minute's worth of sensory information every
year. With a bit more work, you could add "uploading"
ports to the superneurons, so that your consciousness
could be transferred into another body at the speed of
light, or transferred into a body with a new,
higher-speed design. You could even abandon bodies
entirely and sit around in a virtual-reality
environment, chatting with your friends, reading the
library of Congress, or eating three thousand tons of
potato chips without exploding.
If you could design superneurons that were smaller as
well as being faster, so the signals had less distance
to travel... well, I'll skip to the big finish:
Taking 10^17 ops/sec as the figure for the computing
power used by a human brain, and using optimized
atomic-scale hardware, we could run the entire human
race on one gram of matter, running at a rate of one
million subjective years every second.
What would we be doing in there, over the course of
our first trillion years - about eleven and a half
days, real time? Well, with control over the
substrate of our brains, we would have absolute
control over our perceived external environments -
meaning an end to all physical pain. It would mean an
end to old age. It would mean an end to death itself.
It would mean immortality with backup copies. It
would mean the prospect of endless growth for every
human being - the ability to expand our own minds by
adding more neurons (or superneurons), getting smarter
as we age. We could experience everything we've ever
wanted to experience. We could become everything
we've ever dreamed of becoming. That dream - life
without bound, without end - is called Apotheosis.
go here for more info...
http://yudkowsky.net/singularity.html
heard about something called "molecular
nanotechnology". Molecular nanotechnology is the
dream of devices built out of individual atoms -
devices that are actually custom-designed molecules.
It's the dream of infinitesimal robots, "assemblers",
capable of building arbitrary configurations of
matter, atom by atom - including more assemblers. You
only need to build one general assembler, and then in
an hour there are two assemblers, and in another hour
there are four assemblers. Fifty hours and a few tons
of raw material later you have a quadrillion
assemblers. (4)! Once you have your bucket of
assemblers, you can give them molecular blueprints and
tell them to build literally anything - cars, houses,
spaceships built from diamond and sapphire; bread,
clothing, beef Wellington... Or make changes to
existing structures; remove arterial plaque, destroy
cancerous cells, repair broken spinal cords,
regenerate missing legs, cure old age...
I am not a nanotechnology fan. I don't think the
human species has enough intelligence to handle that
kind of power. That's why I'm an advocate of
intelligence enhancement. But unless you've heard of
nanotechnology, it's hard to appreciate the magnitude
of the changes we're talking about. Total control of
the material world at the molecular level is what the
conservatives in the futurism business are predicting.
Material utopias and wish fulfillment - biological
immortality, three-dimensional Xerox machines, free
food, instant-mansions-just-add-water, and so on - are
a wimpy use of a technology that could rewrite the
entire planet on the molecular level, including the
substrate of our own brains. The human brain contains
a hundred billion neurons, interconnected with a
hundred trillion synapses, along which impulses flash
at the blinding speed of... 100 meters per second.
Tops.
If we could reconfigure our neurons and upgrade the
signal propagation speed to around, say, a third of
the speed of light, or 100,000,000 meters per second,
the result would be a factor-of-one-million speedup in
thought. At this rate, one subjective year would pass
every 31 physical seconds (5). Transforming an
existing human would be a bit more work, but it could
be done (6). Of course, you'd probably go nuts from
sensory deprivation - your body would only send you
half a minute's worth of sensory information every
year. With a bit more work, you could add "uploading"
ports to the superneurons, so that your consciousness
could be transferred into another body at the speed of
light, or transferred into a body with a new,
higher-speed design. You could even abandon bodies
entirely and sit around in a virtual-reality
environment, chatting with your friends, reading the
library of Congress, or eating three thousand tons of
potato chips without exploding.
If you could design superneurons that were smaller as
well as being faster, so the signals had less distance
to travel... well, I'll skip to the big finish:
Taking 10^17 ops/sec as the figure for the computing
power used by a human brain, and using optimized
atomic-scale hardware, we could run the entire human
race on one gram of matter, running at a rate of one
million subjective years every second.
What would we be doing in there, over the course of
our first trillion years - about eleven and a half
days, real time? Well, with control over the
substrate of our brains, we would have absolute
control over our perceived external environments -
meaning an end to all physical pain. It would mean an
end to old age. It would mean an end to death itself.
It would mean immortality with backup copies. It
would mean the prospect of endless growth for every
human being - the ability to expand our own minds by
adding more neurons (or superneurons), getting smarter
as we age. We could experience everything we've ever
wanted to experience. We could become everything
we've ever dreamed of becoming. That dream - life
without bound, without end - is called Apotheosis.
go here for more info...
http://yudkowsky.net/singularity.html