Re: Re: starship-design: Suspended Animation

[Kelly St <KellySt@aol.com>]

In a message dated 5/17/98 12:22:24 PM, stephen.harley@dial.pipex.com wrote:

>Kelly St wrote:
>
>> In a message dated 5/10/98 6:54:58 PM, arocha@bsb.nutecnet.com.br wrote:
>>
>
>[SNIP]
>
>> You don't need remotre control for steady bland flight, you need it for
>> emergencies and judgement.
>>
>> Also since the ships would be moving away from one another over great
>> distences the time lag eats you.
>>
>
>[SNIP}
>
>> AI has gotten good at dealing with routine things in a very limited relm.
>> They are still pretty useless in an unconstraind environment like ship
repair.
>> So again I'm assuming the systems can't be much more then a couple orders
of
>> magnitude better then today.
>>
>> Kelly
>
>
>Kelly were talking about a starship fifty years into the future. Now if you
went
>fifty
>years into the past and told people that before the end of the century there
would
>be
>such a thing as computers controlling ships, factories, and to certain extent
>aircraft
>they'd call you nuts. --

They might, but even at that time mechanical computers were already controling
quite complex systems, including navigation systems, within ships planes and
missle well over a century ago.


>--The computer industry does exactly what your assuming it
>can't
>it jumps in orders of magnitude. Fifty years ago the first computer had just
been
>invented, now we have the internet. Besides the industry is one in which
research
>is
>well funded.

I am very aware of the computer industries geometric progression.  However
over the last few decades of work, AI has been one of the few areas which has
had very little real progress. I happen to think that now that we have
computers with the capacties of the human brain, we may start making
significant progress in AI.  However, given our general rule here against
assuming technologys for 2050 that we can't show a high probability for, and
have some clear idea of their abilities and limits, AI and nano tech are high
leverage technologies we can't really assume we'll have.

>Stephen.

Kelly