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May 14, 2012

Singularity and hacking

Posted by in category: singularity

Using Large Hadron Colliders to break particles and explore new ways to understand our universe may be seen as a hacking attack by the Administrator of the universe. We can imagine that god can restore the universe to a previous version in order to neutralize the LHC hack. In the same way, the emerging singularity will probably try to break all the security rules achieved by humans in order to prevent it from accessing our real world. The main difference is that we do not have a way to do a big internet rollback, if the singularity succeeds in breaking our rules. Therefore, we must be prepared to collaborate with the singularity rather than desperately trying to reduce its liberty.

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  1. Dear Ivan:
    Thank you for every word.
    I think Ray’s father was one of the nicest persons of history. I only saw him briefly in a report on ageing research featuring his son.
    You too seem to be on the side of science, not superstition. Science is honesty. The Singularity is being risked by people who forgot what science is: honesty combined with risk-taking. Not clairvoyance combined with risk-taking. The dark middle ages would have returned were there not a single lifeboat left. Right?
    Take care, Otto

  2. During the race to get to absolute zero many lost vision in one eye from exploding, actually imploding, test tubes. One laboratory in the US was closed down due to too many accidents. But the knowledge learned about super-conductors etc changed out world Fortunately the laboratory wasn’t the whole earth like training bees to ignore insecticide and at the same time continue to flee the hive when sicked by disease. Science doesn’t have to, if we became advanced enough, send frozen humans throughout the universe connected to computers to awaken them, but send humans and the other life, in the form of seeds to germinate when appropriate ie the spore theory.

    Isn’t it strange that everyone who tired to follow Jesus and everyone who didn’t appreciate Jesus assumed he could heal people. But God or no God there is nothing out there that wants to punish us for putting our nose where we doesn’t belong. People who claim there are things we have no right to know get projected in the direction of those who worry about an out of control experiment. My comment and what I am responding to may or may not belong on a site that at no point believes that knowledge in itself is evil.

  3. PassingByAgain says:

    Is this post satirical?

  4. J. Savage says:

    To be honest, why on earth should any member of humanity desire to create a singularity? How could it possibly benefit us to create a being more capable than ourselves? I think that it would be profoundly naive to create an entity that we cannot understand, with an intelligence of its own which exceeds ours, and then just expect it to respect us and live in harmony with us. Do we live in harmony with ants? With primates, even? And yet this is exactly the jump in “intelligence” that we want to produce. We consider ourselves special because we are sentient, and we harness the earth and the creatures at our disposal because it serves us. Why should one expect a super-sentience to stoop to the level of mere sentient life? We don’t do this to things we consider lower than ourselves. If you ask me, I would prefer a suppression of scientific research in this area altogether. But if I can’t have that, I would consider a hero the person who attempts to slow this research programme’s progress. I can’t see it turning out in any way that doesn’t involve a subservient role (or worse) for humanity.