Jesse Mazer wrote:
[Quoting Stathis:]
>>However, let us agree that the scenario you describe occurs in a
>>non-negligible proportion of MW branches in which sentient life survives
>>into the indefinite future, and return to Nick Prince's original question
>>which spawned this thread. How will you ensure that your friends in this
>>super-civilization running on this super-network will not disappear due to
>>suicide, homicide, indefinite suspension or transformation into something
>>completely unrecognizable? How will you ensure that *you* won't suicide,
>>and end up in some other branch of the MW? If it possible that one of
>>these things will happen, then over time, it will become a certainty, and
>>you will be left alone. If there are constraints in place to make
>>antisocial, self-destructive or simply perverse behaviour impossible, then
>>(a) that would constitute more severe limits on freedom than the worst
>>fascist state in our time, and (b) all fascist states fall, given time.
>
>As I said earlier, my idea about seeing friends around is that A.I.'s in a
>giant computer network would periodically make copies of themselves, so
>even if a given copy commits suicide or is erased by accident or murder,
>there may be other copies in the network, and if the number of copies
>stemming from a single "common ancestor" (the number of copies belonging to
>a common 'clade') tends to increase geometrically, then the same logic
>about a finite total probability could apply here. Even so, with a friend
>you made fairly recently it may be that all copies descended from the
>common ancestor that you first met will end up getting erased, and of
>course none of the copies descended from earlier common ancestors would
>remember you, and they might be fairly different from the individual you
>knew. But if you have known someone for long enough that there are now a
>huge number of copies of the common ancestor you first met, spread
>throughout the network, then there might be a good chance that there'd be
>at least some copies descended from that common ancestor somewhere in the
>network until the end of time, no matter how many individual copies are
>erased.
>
>Jesse
If the rate of duplication of individuals always matches or surpasses the
rate of destruction, then there will always be at least some individuals
left. You can change "destruction" to "change beyond recognition" and the
same argument applies. However, in a real world situation, all these
paramaters will vary; most especially if we are talking about the decisions
of sentient beings. In fact, even if the running average of these parameters
were consistent over a sufficiently long time period (and I don't know that
this is possible to guarantee: the average will vary over time, and the rate
of change of the average will vary, and the second and third time derivative
of the average will vary, and so on), given infinite time, there will be
periods of negative overall growth which must result in extinction of any
individual entity, or any group of entities, or the entire population. It is
analogous to the gambler's fallacy: given long enough, the gambler will lose
everything, and then he won't have any funds to attempt to recover his
losses. This applies also to the casino, despite the odds being on average
stacked in its favour: if it operates long enough, someone will break the
bank. And in biology, even when a population is still well into the
exponential phase of its growth, there is always the possibility that it
will become extinct.
--Stathis Papaioannou
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Received on Thu Apr 21 2005 - 02:18:28 PDT