Transhuman Space 2110, 2130, 2200

[mindstalk]

I hadn't heard of OCD with perfect memory, but Luria's patient S. was described as being very uncreative, IIRC.

If we're not sure why living orgnanisms need sleep, it might be premature to say that SAI won't need something like sleep, whether human-like or via something like hemispheric partial-functioning.

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

That's what I thought the singularity meant. That everything human from bio-people to "uploaded" people will be vastly outpaced by pure A.I. program entities. What we create will become like gods to that which descends from us.

Vinge's Singularity is at core just the existence of superhuman intelligence -- too smart for the SF author to write about. Even the exponential rise of technology is derivative of that. And Vinge had four pathways: pure AI, brain-computer linkages, brain-brain linked groupminds, and pure biological enhancement via drugs or genes or development. The last shows up in his novel _Tatja Grimm's World_.

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

Again that assumes sleep, boredom, and imperfect memory are fixable flaws rather than features inherent in earth type biology.
I don't believe that one can "fix" them without so modifying the digital biology as to be easier to just chuck the whole thing and start from scratch.
(This is my grandfather's axe. I've replaced the head twice, and the shaft five times, but it's still the same axe.) To use a metaphor.

If I'm a ghost, then even if it's easier to start from scratch, so what? I don't want to make some scratch SAI, I want me, my personality and memories, to get the benefits of improvement. So I'd opt for modifying my digital biology, because that improves *me*.

Obvious candidate for Singularity-level social change: xoxing becomes accepted. Probably in only place at first, say EU or US due to a court decision or some shift in public opinion.

There's a couple of approaches to thinking about the Singularity. One is to take the more radical ideas seriously, whether to embrace of dismiss them, ideas about hard takeoff and godlike AI taking over the world. The other is to think about more realistic transformative technologies, maybe relabeling it a Cognitive Revolution, and THS is already getting into that, with uploading and SAI; just go further. The ability to design minds, in both capability and in loyalty; the ability to duplicate them. Skilled labor as free software, mass produced Einsteins, immortality of personality and memory, experimenting with new cognitive architectures (what happens if you link two digital brains at a neural level, a la the corpus callosum? Or even two meat brains, via some wireless transmission between implants?)