Re: Recycling

[T.L.G.vanderLinden@student.utwente.nl (Timothy van der Linden)]

Reply to Kelly:

>Current indications are that it will accelerate.  Given that we are assuming
>a large space infastructure to build the ship, that would give us all access
>to VAST raw material resouces and wealth.

Growth is not necessary acceleration, besides that the gain for the public
is not always that much. Since the arrival of the televisions, they haven't
changed significantly: 30 years ago there was color tv and now they still
is. It's a bit more rectangular and has a little bit more quality but those
are no real gains. Medical care has grown about as fast as technology but
now that we have removed a lot of diseases, it is not growing that fast.
Maybe there will come a new acceleration after the genome project, but after
a while that will slow down too.
All in all, it will become harder and harder to find new bases to accelerate
from and after a while (few centuries) most will not accelerate anymore.

>> Again, it depends on the gain. These days, many people decide to live from
>> social finances and not to work and earn more money.
>
>True but the welfare is so generous (if you don't mind sucking up to a
>burecrate dweeb) that the people on welfare (generally lower inteligence and
>education) would be hard pressed to find a better paying job.

What happens if the jobs available are to difficult for less intelligent people.
After a while machines and AI will take over a lot of work. And if AI really
become smarter than we are, then all the work we do would be superfluous.

>> I remember that the human brain has E20 neurons. But it is not especially
>> the memory but the the connection between them, all have to be parallel.
>
>The latest issue of ANALOG science fact/science fiction has an artical on
>current and future computer and nano-tech systems.  We alread have built
>computers with more processing power, data flow, and memory capacity then the
>human brain.  (As long as the total data flow rate is as great with a
>non-paralell system, it will work.  Now if we could just tell it what to do!)
> In 20-30 years a 1 human equivelent system should cost what a good home
>computer costs now.  Should help A.I. research quite a bit. ;)

I find it hard to believe, the GRAY C916 computer has a memory of 16Gb and a
computing speed of 16 GFLOPSs. Its I/O bandwith is 13.6 Gb/sec.
(It uses a maximum of 3.5E5 Watt, not something you want in your house)
The amount of bytes is many orders smaller than the amount of neurons of a
human brain (assuming a neuron has about 256 states). As you can see, the
GRAY can recall all it's memory in about 1 sec, but than it doesn't do any
calculations, which are necessary to make any sense in a neural-network.

Further more a few years ago the biggest neural network was 1E5 neurons and
they had a hard time of getting them to work together. A fly has a brain of
1E12 neurons (hope I'm right) so it's a long (but not impossible) way to
human AI.

Timothy