Generation Ships

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by Sunrunners_Fire

Emphasis: lightly

Not if she was only doing it lightly, no, I wouldn't expect it to work either.

You speak as if you'd have a choice in the matter. Heh. Humans are rather malleable with even a basic understanding of chemistry and psychology; the ability to learn means the ability to change.

Within limits, yes. But no, human are not all that malleable, the history of the last century is nasty proof of that. Past a certain point, they break rather than bend. Unless you genetically alter the population, human nature will limit the power of the rulers to change things.

Change can be controlled and directed away from unacceptable and towards acceptable outcomes.

Ethics forbid. Morals forbid. Science? Science doesn't care.

Nor is science as powerful as all that. The changes that can be made are limited to a range of possibilities determined by the material the changes are being applied to. Some very nasty possibilities do exist, but the range is still relatively limited as long as you're dealing with human beings.

... and to make this more on-topic: Given sufficient control over the selection process, over the ship's environment (which it will have) and over the population's intakes (water, food, air) (which it also will have) ... a sufficiently ruthless group that has a guiding ideology is more than capable of forcibly re-writing the ship's culture regardless of the population's preferences in the matter.

Up to a point, yes.

This is why you want AI.

Humans self-corrupt on being given power over other humans. Its' hardwired behavior. You will need something capable of stopping them from risking the mission when they do so; by recycling and restarting the population if the situation isn't recoverable otherwise.

AI could not be relied upon for that. If it's genuinely conscious, AI will have its own agenda. If it's not, it'll be outsmarted or gamed by humans who figure out the limits of the code and work around it.

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by Sunrunners_Fire

It is desirable for children to be better (or at least better off) than their parents. I know I'm going to be horribly disappointed with my (skills as they relate to parenting my) kids if they turn out worse than me! Sapient AI would be best thought of as Humanity's children;

Nope. At best they are servants, at worst they are dangerous competition, they are not children.

The children metaphor doesn't work for a species, because, unlike individuals, a species has an open-ended lifespan. There's no inherent reason why Homo sapiens can't endure indefinitely.

and its' likely we'd "raise" our digital children to take care of us when we're obsolete just as we raise our biological children to take care of us when we're older (aka obsolete).

I'm not seeing the existentialism.

Humanity, as a species, doesn't age and doesn't grow older (except in the trivial chronological sense). Thus comparisons to children and parents are invalid. Machines are tools, designing them to be self-willed is madness, assuming we can do that. A self-willed tool ceases to be useful and may become dangerous.

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by Sunrunners_Fire

Counter: Pets, and the human instinct to anthropomorphize everything around us. We form psychological connections to geographic features for goodness' sake! Some of us form such bonds to our cars, computers and phones now; a better computer that can intelligently talk with us? Heh. Not forming such a connection is going to be the difficult part.

(For an example of a not-AI piece of software that people are forming bonds with even today, check out Apple's Siri and its' fans.)

That doesn't make it valid. Anthropomorphizing pets is a mixed bag, sometimes it matches reality, sometimes it's wishful thinking. But a pet is not a child, even if the human in question likes to pretend otherwise. A car is not a child, a mountain is not a child...and usually, none of these things represents a potential serious threat to one's own well-being and the future of one's actual descendents.

Humans might very well become attached to a given AI. Maybe, for all we know, the reverse could happen too. It still doesn't make them our children.

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2

Nope. At best they are servants, at worst they are dangerous competition, they are not children.

Children are always dangerous competition. At best, they compete against the parents of other children.

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by Sunrunners_Fire

Please point me to where it is demonstrated that humans are (uniquely among life on this planet) immune to selective breeding?

He didn't humans were immune to selective breeding, he was saying selective breeding doesn't work the way you're implying in any animal species. It's not that simple.

Some traits do select easily on straight dominant/recessive lines. Others depend on so many different genes that you can't even accurately predict where they'll turn up. Some appear to be dependent on particular interactions of genes and environment, so what is selected for it not the trait but the potential for the trait. Epigenetic changes further complicate the picture, some acquired traits can be inherited. Some hereditary traits appear to be the result of a melange of different genes, none of which individually could be said to code for it. Some traits are breedable, but are tightly linked to other traits that you either don't want to change or can't help changing for the worse. It's a super-complicated mess, and sometimes it appears that the more we learn the more we discover we don't know.

Even very simple traits are often complicated in their basis. Science fiction greatly overestimates the near-future possibilities of human genegineering.

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

Children are always dangerous competition. At best, they compete against the parents of other children.

Which is fine. That's another reason why AI's are not 'humanity's children'. Humanity is an abstraction, only humans exist.

Regarding competition, there's a simple answer. I am going to die. That's going to happen to me whether I reproduce or not, and it'll happen in a relatively knowable amount of time. Bar some technical breakthrough, I won't be alive 100 years from now, and probably not 50 years from now, and of course nothing is guaranteed about tomorrow.

So competition from my offspring and their offspring is something of a moot point. But competition between humans and AIs is not a moot point, assuming the AIs are capable of competing at all.

(We don't even strictly know if full AIs are possible or not, yet.)

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2

...
(We don't even strictly know if full AIs are possible or not, yet.)

Of course they're possible. There is no law of physics that requires sapience to exist only in wet biological species.
But how difficult it is to make them is not known. I have trouble seeing how we can create something equal to ourselves when there is so much about ourselves we do not know.

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

Domestication is probably a side-effect of maturation genes and caninies are extremely prone to manipulation of them.

The main difference between wolves and dogs is that dogs retain puppy-like behavior all their lives much more often than wolves. Dogs stillwant to play games with their litter-mates (and this includes their favorite humans) when wolves want to get on with catching supper and making little wolves.

Playing with the maturation genes is also how you control size. Chihuahuas just barely go through enough puberty to be able to reproduce while Great Danes get a double or triple helping of it.

So, no not really a complex trait in canies (and their relatively close relatives foxes). On the other hand it might not even be much of a genetic option among other animals. We've never done very well with projects to domesticate most types of deer as just one example.

As was actually noted once in a GURPS worldbook, humans have genuinely domesticated only a handful of mammal species out of the huge numbers that exist. It's taken us tens of thousands of years to do it, and there's still a wide range of difference in degree in the success.

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

Of course they're possible. There is no law of physics that requires sapience to exist only in wet biological species.

We have no idea if that's true or not, because we don't understand what sapience is or how it works. It might be something innate to biology, it might not, we just don't know.

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2

As was actually noted once in a GURPS worldbook, humans have genuinely domesticated only a handful of mammal species out of the huge numbers that exist. It's taken us tens of thousands of years to do it, and there's still a wide range of difference in degree in the success.

Then take a step back and realize how basic domestication really is. All you want is an animal that doesn't consider you a horrible predator or prey and accepts human care. In essence breeding laziness, and that took thousands of years for most of them.