Is Intelligence Self-Limiting?

Iirc, there was an article a while back (or maybe a link from a comment) about how video games were the real reason behind the fermi paradox. The argument was that a civilization's entertainment would constantly be improving to the point where we could jack into a self-controlled matrix-like world where we had complete control and, in essence, are deities in our self-fabricated worlds. If we built robots to ensure our real-life conditions were safe and sanitary, it would be very difficult for the majority of mankind to resist the urge to directly modify the signals and ... MOOF!

Considering how many ways there are to modify the signals now: playing WoW, using drugs, even using alcohol to give a quick and easy boost. I'm not sure how the vast majority would be able to turn down such a machine.

I've been thinking about this recently: drug addicts "seem" unhappy because they don't match the usual outward appearance of happiness. But who's to say in their lifetime they haven't experienced many orders of magnitude more happiness than even the happiest non-addicts? Drug addiction breaks the usual profile of happiness, it doesn't mean that they're not actually the happiest people who ever lived.

"1. AI isn't close to human level (HL) yet. I don't think we can really know what HL will be like till we get a lot closer.

2. You can't get people to seriously discuss policy until HL is closer. The present discussants, e.g. Bill Joy, are just chattering.

3. People are not distinguishing HL AI from programs with human-like motivational structures. It would take a special effort, apart from the effort to reach HL intellignece to make AI systems wanting to rule the world or get angry with people or see themselves as oppressed. We shouldn't do that. "

--john mccarthy

edit: I also want to point out that a murder-happy pill is a straw man argument. It will never happen for two reasons: 1-we have evolved to find murder repugnant, so the rewards wouldn't seem appealing to us 2-there are real life repercussions to murdering someone, so the joys would be limited in their duration.

We already have happy medicines that are legal. Valium, alcohol, WoW... I would bet that most people who are reading this have self-medicated on at least one of those before. And those are rather weak medications. They pale in comparison to what the robot was able to do by short circuiting the pleasure center in his brain.

It only takes a tiny percentage to turn down said machine. If 10 billion people plug-in, but 1 million abstain and continue to evolve past the 10 billion, the majority stagnates. Those 1 million will eventually gain a competitive advantage over the 10 billion, evolve past them, and likely extinct them.

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Prediction: Humans won't be around in 1,000 years if technology progresses at current rates. Superiorly-intelligent entities seeded by our inventions will, but not humans.

Humans are this weird, version 0.01 of intelligence. We're part sentient, part beast. To assume we're the final perfect end product of ~4,000,000,000 years of evolution, having only been around for ~200,000 years is laughable. Pop culture and religion say otherwise because it feels good to think "we're special!", but we're only special relative to what's around us, and we're "extremely" tiny (http://www.phrenopolis.com/perspective/solarsystem/). We just happen to be the lucky first who got to v0.01, floating around on a grain of sand.

Humans are messy. Our brains are significantly limited. We die quickly. We sleep 1/3rd of our life. We do stupid things. We kill each other. We're tied to the Earth. If we leave Earth, we have to create and bring a mini-Earth along for the ride. That's an extremely large amount of overhead to carry. Efficient use of energy is likely one of the most important aspects of space travel. Anything which can do it even 1% better has a competitive advantage over us. This is why we sends robots to Mars and not people.

Imagine a form of intelligence which can travel through space, back its brain up, and never dies. If it blows up, restore from backup. Imagine a computer the size of the sun. INSANE! A human brain to a sun brain is like a grain of sand to Einstein's. It self-upgrades. It makes copies of itself and scatters throughout the universe. Trillions of eyes observing everywhere, networked together, in a giant universal wireless-mesh-network of intelligence, communicating with neutrinos (they go through planets, radio waves do not).

Major advances in hardware, software, and A.I. are key ingredients in this happening. What exists in 1,000 years will be derived from all this, much like humans are derived from a common ancestor. I don't expect a sun-sized computer in 1,000 years, but likely "intelligence" existing on every planet and moon in our solar system, with many headed to explore Alpha-Centauri.

Since humans likely won't want to be left out in all this, we'll probably transition our own intelligence/consciousness into this technology. We'll depreciate our bad and carry along our good. We're already doing this by augmenting our existences with smart phones and other gadgets. One day these will be built inside of us, and eventually will replace us. An upgraded, better version of us. Still intelligent, but vastly more-so.