meganmayThu, Aug 2, 2007 ok, so lets imagine tomorrow we could rid ourselves of these outdated, eating, sweating, lusting, farting flesh bags by downloading our minds to a chip, or some other more advanced form of electronic storage. there, our mind could exist for all of time, and other minds who've undergone the same downloading procedure could plug in and we could assimilate each others knowledge at the speed of light.
better yet, imagine if every mind on the planet were downloaded and interconnected so as to create a supermind, whose knowledge base far exceeded that of our individual minds, and which could transmit any and all information to and from any point within its complex network, like rapid-fire synapses.
This disembodied supermind would be the sum total of all human intelligence, an unparalleled triumph over the human body...but how would it ever get smarter?
Funnily enough, this would be the stupidest superintelligence of all time if there were no way for it to receive input from the world and continuously learn from it.
maybe we never wanted a planetary supermind to begin with, but the point is, we'll need some sort of input, be it flesh based or not, to feed our minds.
how would we imagine a new input system that allows us to obtain knowledge at an equivilent or superior quality as the first 5 we know so well? would we maintain all five? omit one? or decide we wanted to add xray, infared, and/or night vision? how would tampering with our perceptive abilities change our cognitive capacity?
ok, so lets imagine tomorrow we could rid ourselves of these outdated, eating, sweating, lusting, farting flesh bags by downloading our minds to a chip, or some other more advanced form of electronic storage. there, our mind could exist for all of time, and other minds who've undergone the same downloading procedure could plug in and we could assimilate each others knowledge at the speed of light.
better yet, imagine if every mind on the planet were downloaded and interconnected so as to create a supermind, whose knowledge base far exceeded that of our individual minds, and which could transmit any and all information to and from any point within its complex network, like rapid-fire synapses.
This disembodied supermind would be the sum total of all human intelligence, an unparalleled triumph over the human body...but how would it ever get smarter?
Funnily enough, this would be the stupidest superintelligence of all time if there were no way for it to receive input from the world and continuously learn from it.
maybe we never wanted a planetary supermind to begin with, but the point is, we'll need some sort of input, be it flesh based or not, to feed our minds.
how would we imagine a new input system that allows us to obtain knowledge at an equivilent or superior quality as the first 5 we know so well? would we maintain all five? omit one? or decide we wanted to add xray, infared, and/or night vision? how would tampering with our perceptive abilities change our cognitive capacity?