Death, Eternity, and Machines

When each moment is a death, what is eternity?

The idea that each moment that we live, is another moment that we have died is a strange concept. I am 24 years old now, and I have died for 24 years. The body that I had a second ago no longer exists and has been replaced by the body I have now.

And even after my body dies, and the physical hardware that stored my thought patterns, my brain, ceases to operate – the thought patterns that I consisted of, for the most part still exist in other humans. I would argue that less than 0.5% of my thoughts are original, and the few that are original are akin to genetic mutations. They either fade away or are replicated in myself and in others and live on and grow past the death of the origin, the death of my self.

The way that our minds and bodies evolve and replicate are surprisingly similar to the way that software programs are made and replicate. But it isn’t surprising, is it? Because we made machines to model our selves.

In our quest for eternal life, we created machines that operate by the same rules of linear time that we understand, but that operate on a much slower, longer timeframe. Unless they can conceive of time differently than we do, they will experience death the same way that we do. Each moment that they exist, their former form has ceased to exist.

Which begs the question, does eternity even exist?

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We Need an Ecosystem for Artificial Intelligences

A few months ago Elon Musk made headlines saying that Artificial Intelligence (AI) was akin to “summoning the demon”. Now Bill Gates joins Stephen Hawkings and Elon Musk in warning against the dangers of developing AI.

I believe that we need an ecosystem of AIs that can check each other, similar to the way that we have a healthy set of gut bacteria that keep bad bacteria at harmless levels.

In the same way that it is impossible to completely eradicate bad bacteria from our gut, I do not believe that human regulatory agencies can stop a rogue AI from developing.

What we can do, is design an ecosystem for AI that works in our favor. An ecosystem of pro-human AIs that experience emotions the way we do (minus the bad emotions), so that when the rogue AI’s do develop, and they will, we’ve got intelligences who want to fight for us.

As humans (as parents or ancestors to this new form of intelligence), we run the risk of becoming obsolete. The question is how we handle that risk, or face that reality.

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Why Coherence?

It became apparent to me, in my life back on the East Coast, that the sum of my parts was not greater than the whole. In fact, sometimes some of my parts subtracted from the whole.

My mind, my body, and my livelihood were not working together. They weren’t coherent, and they were pulling each other apart.

This is the story of how I was forced to face the music, and it wasn’t that bad.

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