AI View of AI, Scaling Wars

The artilects, as they have been conceived so far in this book, have been largely "nanoteched" creatures. But nanotechnology may be unnecessarily restrictive and far too large a scale to be suitable for advanced artilects. It may be possible that a "femtoteched" creature could be built. Such "femto-artilects" or "femtolects" as they will be called from now on, would be vastly superior to "nano-artilects" or "nanolects," thus setting the stage for a new "species dominance war" all over again. ...

 The World of the Electron and the Switch

This is our world now... the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud. We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals. We explore... and you call us criminals. We seek after knowledge... and you call us criminals. We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias... and you call us criminals. You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murde...

 Computronium

In programmable matter, the same cubic meter of machinery can become a wind tunnel at one moment, a polymer soup at the next; it can model a sea of fermions [elementary particles], a genetic pool, or an epidemiology experiment at the flick of a console key. Ten times as large a simulation will simply require ten cubic meters of machinery, instead of one. Flexibility, instant reconfigurability, variable resolution, total accessibility, and handling safety make such programmable matter worth a ...

 How Neural Circuitry is Laid Down

In thinking about hidden layers, it’s important to distinguish between the routine efficiency and power of a good network, once that network has been set up, and the difficult issue of how to set it up in the first place. That difference is reflected in the difference between playing the piano (or, say, riding a bicycle, or swimming) once you’ve learned (easy) and learning to do it in the first place (hard). Understanding exactly how new hidden layers get laid down in neural circuitry is ...

 The Majority do Robot Work

Someone had to run the harvesters in the rice and sugarcane fields, check the irrigation canals or robots, install things, fix things. Humans were still not only the cheapest robots around, but also, for many tasks, the only robots that could do the job. They were self-reproducing robots too. They showed up and worked, generation after generation; give them three thousand calories a day and a few amenities, a little time off, and a strong jolt of fear, and you could work them at almost anythi...