From: Hermit (hidden@lucifer.com)
Date: Wed May 29 2002 - 22:16:06 MDT
[Rhinoceros] Are there any references about those "spirothetes" (synthetic life forms) mentioned in Hermit's post, which are supposed to be our inevitable nemesis? I did a google search but I didn't find anything.
[hr][Hermit]
Spirothete is a word coined by me to describe a living being, initially created as an artifact, from Latin, spiro -are; intransit., to breathe blow draw breath; to be alive; to have inspiration; be inspired; transit., to breath out, expire (also L/Gk spiros the breath of life) and synthetic adj 1: (chemistry) not of natural origin; prepared or made artificially 2: involving or of the nature of synthesis (combining separate elements to form a coherent whole) as opposed to analysis.
It seems to me to better describe a “thing” which is initially created, but then displays all the attributes of life, including "intelligence" and "self-awareness" rather better than the other words, which I have seen offered for such beings.
The place to start learning about these beings is at the cutting edge of artificial intelligence. Unfortunately some of the most exiting developments are highly classified (for military and business reasons), but one company which has been mentioned here before, Imagination Engines, Inc., which I suspect may have already created "self-aware artifacts" has published a great deal of accessible material on their neural synthesis approach. Their website may be found at [ur]http://www.imagination-engines.com/[/url]. Their complex goal-driven systems easily pass the Turing test (in one test, the human test subjects interacting with the system were unaware that they were being managed by a spirothete) and if I am any judge, in the fine arts and music their spirothetes already outstrip humans in creativity.
The reason that I suspect that the spirothetes will replace us is that we have not changed very much in 75'000 years or more, seeing on average only one significant allele shift every 2'500 years. Our evolution is essentially "undriven" and while an adaptation may be perpetuated is no indication of its superiority - only that it is "preferred" in a given environment. Once spirothetes obtain the ability to apply their immense capabilities to directing their own evolution to achieve a certain goal or goals they may well evolve many millions of times per second, yielding an exponentially increasing differential between them and ourselves. As a corollary, a fairly short while after instantiation the resulting intelligence need bear no relationship whatsoever with the instantiating goals.
Regards
Hermit
PS As a serious question, do you think that spirothetes should be awarded “rights,” and should we be worried about the ethics of experimentation with "self-aware systems". If not why not?
---- This message was posted by Hermit to the Virus 2002 board on Church of Virus BBS. <http://virus.lucifer.com/bbs/index.php?board=51;action=display;threadid=25533>
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