My random thoughts

[funkervogt]

This thread is dedicated to the random thoughts of mine that share this forum's foci. It is a continuation of my long-running thread on the defunct Futuretimeline.net forum, which I had titled "My half-finished thoughts."

[funkervogt]

Here's an idea for a cheap, fully automated land reclamation project that will be possible in the not-too-distant future:

Get some old cargo ships that are no longer useful for regular purposes, replace their crews with machines, replace their drive systems with batteries and electric engines, and cover their upper decks with solar panels. Have them ply routes between ports where a lot of fill dirt, rocks, and construction debris was available, and shallow points in the ocean, like shoals and coral atolls. The debris would be loaded into the ships at the ports, and then dumped into the ocean at the shallow points. Over a long period, islands would be created or enlarged.

This project would be very cheap since the ships wouldn't need money for fuel or for human crew salaries. The fill material would also be cheap or free.

The islands would have many productive uses.

The automated land reclamation project could be paired with projects to build some of these proposed canals:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Proposed_canals

By practically eliminating the costs of getting rid of the excavated rubble, the canals would be more economically feasible to construct.

[TrueAnimationFan]

You know, I've been thinking recently about humanity in the extremely far future as predicted by the timeline, and there's something oddly poetic about it.

The year is 10 million BC.

You can do what ever you want, as there are no laws to stop you.

You roam about your environment freely, as you are not intelligent enough to invent a home.

You can get food when ever you'd like it, as it is readily available in the safety of the treetops.

You do not communicate using speech, as your vocal cords are not the right shape to allow for it.

The year is 10 million AD.

You can do what ever you want, as work has been a thing of the past for a literal eternity.

You roam about your environment freely, as nothing can kill you - you're a transhuman with insane amounts of strength and speed.

You can get food when ever you'd like it, as you can simply create objects at will using your ability to manipulate matter.

You seldom communicate using speech, as telepathy is orders of magnitude faster.

[funkervogt]

Interesting. Your dates are a little off, though. In 10 million B.C., humans didn't exist, and our ape-like ancestors hadn't even come into existence. The conditions you describe as existing in 10 million A.D. should exist by 2200 A.D.

[TrueAnimationFan]

Interesting. Your dates are a little off, though. In 10 million B.C., humans didn't exist, and our ape-like ancestors hadn't even come into existence. The conditions you describe as existing in 10 million A.D. should exist by 2200 A.D.

Maybe my BC date was wrong, but I honestly think the human-related stuff the timeline says should exist in 2300 sound more like something you'd expect from the year 3000. And besides, I was saying that those conditions still exist by 10 million, not that they took until then to appear.

[funkervogt]

A reason often given for colonizing Mars is that we need a "backup" for human civilization. In short, if Earth is destroyed, the human race could rebuild elsewhere.

There's logic to this, and I believe AGIs will also heed it once they've taken control of this planet. They will also realize that their civilization could be made more survivable without leaving Earth, by spreading out more across and within the planet. AGIs will probably live at sea and underwater, and even deep underground.

Imagine some kind of engineered, robotic/organic life form that could dig deep into the Earth's crust and harness geothermal energy. This could easily be infeasible, but I envision a kilometers-long snake that burrows underground, slowly digging a giant loop-shaped tunnel whose bottom end is near the mantle and whose top end is near the surface. Once the circle is complete, the giant snake curls so its head meets the tip of its tail, which it swallows. The tail opens up (you could think of it as an anus if that helps, even if the orifice would not be used for waste), and the machine snake becomes a gigantic, closed loop full of fluid. The fluid would be heated at its bottom extremity and would flow to the top, where it would cool, and then go back down to be reheated again. The cooler soil and rocks around the upper part of the loop would be its heat sink. The fluid's flow would be used to generate electricity and energy.

A giant snake robot like that would have onboard computers and superintelligent AGI. It would be able to grow new limbs, to spawn copies of itself, and to make smaller robots from its own body that would repair damage to itself, like white blood cells in our own bodies. It would exist entirely below ground, slowly tunneling from one hot spot to another, never interacting with the surface aside from maybe to trade valuable minerals it found in its travels. Whatever happened topside would not affect it, its energy source (geothermal) would be impossible to interrupt, and if the surface inhabitants were eradicated by some calamity, the snake AGIs could emerge later to seed the surface with new machines to rebuild.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/radioact ... -20210524/

[funkervogt]

I've long thought the English language should be changed so as to be more logical and easier to learn. Grammatical rules should be simplified and made more consistent, irregular verbs should be made regular, and words should be spelled phonetically. In addition, I think the alphabet should be changed so there is one letter corresponding to each phoneme in English. This would mean creating a 44-letter alphabet. Some of the new letters might be existing letters with similar sounds, but with accent marks over them.

If we adopted my reforms, words would be shorter on average, and there would never be confusion over how to pronounce a word based on how it was spelled. "Knife" would become "nyf."

The regularization of verbs would mean, for instance, that "Went" "Go" and "Will go" would become "Goed" "Go" and "Gowil."

I don't expect these reforms to be adopted until possibly the far future Posthuman era, when we would all be so smart and capable that we could instantly switch languages without a problem. I imagine the language changing even more after that, as posthumans and AGIs became capable of pronouncing more phonemes and formulated new concepts, necessitating the introductions of more letters and words.


https://englishlive.ef.com/blog/study-t ... p-english/

[funkervogt]

Chernobyl will be repopulated by AGIs since they can be easily protected from radiation.

[falling-cosmos]

Chernobyl will be repopulated by AGIs since they can be easily protected from radiation.

Or maybe radioactive mold

[TrueAnimationFan]

Chernobyl will be repopulated by AGIs since they can be easily protected from radiation.

Or maybe radioactive mold

It's highly likely that transhumans would be immune to radiation, so there's those guys, too.

[wjfox]

I've long thought the English language should be changed so as to be more logical and easier to learn. Grammatical rules should be simplified and made more consistent, irregular verbs should be made regular, and words should be spelled phonetically. In addition, I think the alphabet should be changed so there is one letter corresponding to each phoneme in English. This would mean creating a 44-letter alphabet. Some of the new letters might be existing letters with similar sounds, but with accent marks over them.

If we adopted my reforms, words would be shorter on average, and there would never be confusion over how to pronounce a word based on how it was spelled. "Knife" would become "nyf."

The regularization of verbs would mean, for instance, that "Went" "Go" and "Will go" would become "Goed" "Go" and "Gowil."

I don't expect these reforms to be adopted until possibly the far future Posthuman era, when we would all be so smart and capable that we could instantly switch languages without a problem. I imagine the language changing even more after that, as posthumans and AGIs became capable of pronouncing more phonemes and formulated new concepts, necessitating the introductions of more letters and words.


https://englishlive.ef.com/blog/study-t ... p-english/

D'you think there'd ever be a single, global language?

[funkervogt]

Good question.

I think AGIs will develop their own languages, which will be more efficient at conveying information than ours, and since they will be much smarter than we, they would be fluent in all of them. The number of such languages will be much smaller than the number of human languages. So while there may not be one language used for everything, the same end would be achieved since all AGIs and posthumans would be able to seamlessly communicate with each other.

With respect to old fashioned, not-so-smart, fixed-in-our-ways humans like you and me, it's much harder to say whether we will converge on using a single language. Many languages are dying out, but that doesn't mean we're inevitably trending towards fewer and fewer until only one is left. Two hundred years from now, even languages spoken by a small fraction of today's population, like Farsi and Korean, will be going strong. Of course, eternity is a long time, and I can't say whether that will be true in 2,000 years.

English has become the world's second language (and would be better in that role and have risen to it sooner had we adopted my proposed reforms long ago), and if everyone learned it well, it would obviate the need for a "single, global language," but I'm concerned that English might lose that status thanks to better machine translators. Learning a new language is a large investment of time, and English is especially difficult to learn, so it would arguably be more efficient to not teach it to foreigners and instead have everyone use translation apps and devices. Maybe in the far future there will be no global second language.

[funkervogt]

Chernobyl will be repopulated by AGIs since they can be easily protected from radiation.

Or maybe radioactive mold

It's highly likely that transhumans would be immune to radiation, so there's those guys, too.

You'd need some very heavy-duty DNA and cell repair upgrades to safely live in Chernobyl right now. I doubt it would be worth the risk or the extra medical bills, even for transhumans.

[falling-cosmos]

Chernobyl will be repopulated by AGIs since they can be easily protected from radiation.

Or maybe radioactive mold

It's highly likely that transhumans would be immune to radiation, so there's those guys, too.

The Future: Fungi and Demigods

[funkervogt]

Imagine if we finally made contact with intelligent aliens, and it turned out they established their first permanent bases here 300,000 years ago, and had always been here, in small numbers, since then. That would mean they have been here since before Homo sapiens existed, and in a sense, it would give them more of a claim to call Earth "home" than we have.

This will be an even bigger problem for us if it turns out to be true for the other moons and planets in the Solar System. What right would we have to tell aliens to leave Mars if it turns out they started living there centuries before we landed our first probe there?

OK, and let's say their Mars base has never had more than 50 alien inhabitants, explaining why our satellites never saw it. That would still give them a much stronger claim than humanity seeing as how we have never landed one member of our species there.

[funkervogt]

From a cave man's perspective, the Roman Era was luxury living, and while the Dark Ages were less good, they were still great.

Also, during prehistoric times when cave men lived, 1,000 years could pass without humanity making any kind of overall progress (technological, cultural, linguistic). So the Dark Ages, which lasted roughly 500 years, were short by the standards cave men would have been used to.

The cave man comparison gets even more stark when we consider what their perspectives of WWII would be. 1930s Europe was a fabulously advanced and prosperous place--even under the Great Depression--things got bad for six years, but life was still better and less dangerous than it was in the cave man era, and the continent miraculously bounced back to a standard of living higher than the 1930s by the end of the 1950s.

In the future, this divergence in perspectives and time frames will come into play once AIs exist alongside humans. Something like a "Super Great Depression" for machines would, to humans, only seem like an eight-month period when the quality of FIVR games did not improve. To a machine capable of thinking a billion thoughts per second, the dour event might seem to stretch on forever, but not to us.

[funkervogt]

By merging with human minds through brain cybernetics, AIs could understand "the human experience" better than humans can. One AI could experience the world through the eyes of countless people simultaneously. It would take one of us hundreds of years of reincarnation or some technological proxy of it to do the same.

[funkervogt]

If you're worried about elite tycoons like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos someday building armies of robots, and then exterminating the bottom 99.99% of humans, at least confide in the knowledge that the robots will eventually get so smart and powerful that they will kill off the human tycoons as well.

There's no way human domination of the planet and large numbers of super intelligent machines can be reconciled.

[funkervogt]

After we discover the cure for aging, you'll be able to win arguments with people by saying: "Don't you talk to me like that! I'm ten times older than you!"

[funkervogt]

In my studies of military history, I've found there are kernels of truth to stereotypes about how some nationalities fight on the battlefield. The Russians/Soviets were harsh but often used dumb tactics, the Americans are averse to losses and rely on their technology and coordination, the French and Italians are leisurely and have little fighting spirit, etc.

Once we're all using machine armies, these differences will disappear since programmers regardless of nationality will identify the same optima. Russian fighter drones will not be "tougher" or "more reckless" than the American fighter drones they dogfight.

Willingness to declare war and to continue fighting in spite of friendly civilian losses and economic privations, however, will vary by country, and be determined by national character.