Friday, June 24, 2011

The Horrors of the Future

Friendly AI* probably won't be a problem if, as I suspect, it turns out to be substantially easier to enhance humans than it is to create intelligence from scratch.

*The problem of ensuring that the interests of any self-improving-come-super-intelligent AIs remain aligned to human interests. For fictional examples of failed FAI see any techno-dystopic movie e.g. Terminator, the Matrix, I Robot, etcetera.

Time Travel

Forget Hawking's postulated time travel consistency principle, the principle of non-contradiction is all that's needed. If time really is much like a spatial dimension and arbitrarily traversable--if time travel is possible--no paradoxes will occur since there is no "first" run through of time. There is simply 12:24am June 24th 2011. Time paradoxes will not occur for the very same reason that a thrown ball doesn't go both left and right at the same time.