Singularity Soon

13. You are here

Rajiv heard some people talking in the hallway about the procedures for backing up their backups. By design, the office door could not be closed, but they couldn't see his desk around the corner. They sounded super serious.

Still, nothing to get upset about. Why had he felt such dread for a moment?

He sat in the presence of a revelation, but couldn't see clearly yet. The black screen in front of him read THIS CONCLUDES THE TEST.

There was another icon for a research abstract. He clicked on it and read the technical text, and something came through.

Rajiv had always thought most people were stupid, and society was only slightly less dumb.

The proof was that no one was trying to invent a way to extract and save the information content in a human mind. It could even become the basis of a social movement or new religion, but no one seemed to care enough. Yet everyone feared death, as demonstrated by the great power of religion. Each death was an irreversible cataclysm.

To him, that meant that people's preferences were too short-term, mere quantity over quality.

Rajiv thought it would be easy to map his mind in full. The hard part was extracting all of his detailed memories. That would take far longer than his remaining years.

Yet it might not matter.

A transcendental insight had just been confirmed. This insight might make the first hyper-computer possible, and a tiny part of the confirmation came from Rajiv's reactions during the just completed mind test.

It was all super simple really.

CLUE THE FIRST:

Imagine asking a toddler's opinion on corporate tax rebate policies. Totally absurd of course. And yet that toddler WOULD have an opinion on every conceivable question, if only there were enough eons to explain it sufficiently clearly.

Any mind was unlimited, given enough drive and motivation, which could always be provided.

CLUE THE SECOND:

Consciousness was like paint, or like the trunk of a tree. Or maybe a shockwave endlessly circling a closed loop of quantum superfluid.

Consciousness was purely a surface phenomenon. The interior mechanisms had been automated and became inaccessible to perception. If a mind existed in a stable environment for long enough, it would become mindlessly efficient and lose consciousness.

Even highly advanced god-like hyper-minds would appear almost entirely chaotic.

Only at the "terminal level", were they interacted with outside reality and other minds, could they bring their immense intelligence to bear.

To do so, they swept a far larger proportion of reality under the rug. Great intelligence came at the price of greater ignorance. The smarter you got, the less you could know about your natural environment. That turned out to be a feature not a bug.

Last night at 23:54, the Multipliers had achieved a breakthrough in their six-year research program. All from a highly modified version of Conway's Game of Life.

Brains had existed for hundreds of millions of years. A small mutation could have caused brain matter to expand into hyper-intelligence right at the start. Three quarters of a billion years past, there were vast floating spongelike mats, whose cells were quite similar to neurons. It SHOULD have happened then, but hadn't.

Now they knew exactly why. Of course, they had always known there were many more ways brain development could go wrong than right - but now they had a rigorous solution. They understood the precise obstacles, the statistical reason why things almost always went wrong.