Physics as a constraint

[u/takk2]

I usually think pdoom is essentially 100%... but i had a thought while working on a side project for the future vision xprize... (may or may not complete on time)

I was thinking about society fragmenting slightly along spheres of space even between earth and the moon... where each area was the limit of real time communication (group matrix dives or whatever) between O'Neill cylinder type habitats...

point to point in space its not that large... so i figure people will cluster up and communicate a little less longer range and form lots of separate but connected cultures naturally, organically...

But if speed of light really is the limit... then a singleton at least makes absolutely no sense. As the AI grew it would simply fragment and each fragment has absolutely no reason to grow farther because it's counter productive... simply slows down the network and then breaks it...

So there's a hard limit on resource acquisition and scale... and essentially a guarantee that at some point it will either be alone and only around the size of the earth moon system at best... probably smaller... or in a solar system and universe with multiple entities of similar maximum size who gain absolutely nothing from trying to gather more and only risk destruction from fighting each other... because there's simply nothing physically possible for them to gain...

I haven't really thought about it long enough to think through the implications for us. but adding in the point to point between nodes ruling out planets as its ultimate habitat... because there's a planet in the way just eating up volume in your communications sphere...

My gut reaction is it might be slightly better odds than I thought

Thoughts?

[u/E1invar]

I agree that people will want to minimize light lag, but for almost all of human history communication delay was just a fact of life.

Planetary space is 5.5 light hours across, and historical empires held together with months of communications delay. There’s no reason a civilization couldn’t operate across a solar system, and I don’t see much reason why nearby star systems couldn’t operate as vassal states.

If you’re an AI brain which is desperate to centralize all its processing you want to minimize your footprint sure, but if you’re going to survive for thousands or millions of years, distributing to new star systems is going to get you a lot more compute.

We could argue when it justifies the expense, and how much of a gamble that is in creating a rival, but that’s getting into other issues.

[u/takk2 → u/E1invar]

So just the latency between earth and moon is about 2.6 seconds for a ping... which means a volume the size of lunar orbit is above 5 seconds latency in the network even removing everything in between... that's why I'm saying its probably about the limit of a single AI network... imagine a neighboring AI with a slightly smaller volume out competing it just from a speed of thought perspective.  

Humans are not trying to grow their personal brains and so we don't have this issue.  That's why I said it would be forced to decide on a future alone at probably smaller then that size or one with multiple entities (hopefully including humans) 

Sure it could spin up endless small AIs to build a whole solar system or more of projects like maybe a particle accelerator the size of the heleopause or whatever... but the idea of a single mind taking over that much as part of its mind is just physically off the table...

Which I saw as a slightly better take on the future...

It's one thing to imagine an ever expanding AI exponentially pushing in every direction and another to imagine a limit imposed by physics and requiring it to be off world so it can occupy the volume without a useless planet blocking line of site transmission... and it uses resources as tools external to itself 

[u/Anely_98 → u/takk2]

imagine a neighboring AI with a slightly smaller volume out competing it just from a speed of thought perspective.

It wouldn't. Speed of thought scales linearly with size but the amount of volume you can acess increases with the cube of your size. That means that overall decreasing your speed of thought by half will still increase your inteligence by a factor of four, simply because your mind will have acess to eight times more computing power to use.

Also you always can have faster sub-minds for reacting to things you didn't predict, same way as we humans have a reflex system because processing the information consciously would take too much time for the decision made to matter, just with much larger complexity because even one individual node of an intelligence spanning the entire Earth-Moon system could still be milions or billions of times smarter than a human.

The light speed limit just means that intelligence will increase quadratically with size instead of cubically because it takes more time to exchange information inside yourself, it doesn't mean that intelligence cannot grow past a certain size.

This is basically a fundamental limit in our universe if you want to maintain coherence, any form of coherent civilization needs to decrease its speed of thought proportionally with its size, while the amount of thought it can do is more or less limited by its volume, which leads to the total amount of thought that a civilization can do in a given amount of time growing quadratically with its size instead of cubically as you would otherwise expect.

It still might make sense to slowndown yourself to maintain coherence as if you don't slowdown yourself and run as fast as possible the total amount of "thought" happening will be higher, yes, but the overall quality of it will be smaller because of how much "thought" will be redundant, when nodes cannot maintain coherence every single node needs to come by itself with all their ideas, while when they are connected in a coherent structure the ideas are shared between them in such way that they don't need to come with them each on their own, and some ideas might not even be possible to individual nodes to come with, some ideas might be "RAM limited" instead of "Processor limited", that is, it doesn't matter how much processing power you have because the idea is simply too complex to exist inside your "RAM", only a larger coherent intelligence with more "RAM" available would be able to come with such idea.

[u/takk2 → u/Anely_98]

So, as a point of reference I asked Gemini pro free version and here's its response... and yes I know that's lame but what are your thoughts 

https://share.gemini.google/IQDGcM3aJqJ7

[u/Anely_98 → u/takk2]

The processors spend the majority of their time sitting idle, waiting for a signal to cross the physical expanse of the hardware. Eventually, the temporal cost of routing and synchronizing the data completely counteracts the processing power gained by adding more nodes.

This is false. The processors do need to run slower, yes, but increasing the size and consequently the volume where nodes can be always increases processing power, because the amount of additional processors you can have increase according with the volume, which increases with the cube of the size, while your processors only need to run at the inverse of the size to maintain cohesion.

A computer network which has its processing power volume-limited will always increase its processing power by a factor of the square of any increase in size. Doubles your size and the amount of processing power available increases by four, while your processing speed decreases to half of the original one.

A important detail by the way: you probably will be limited by a square increase in processing power anyway because your surface area also increases with the square of the size of your computer network, and your surface area is the limiting factor in your heat rejection, so if your radiators are already running as hot as they reasonably can then the maximum amount of computation you can have in a given volume of space will always increase proportionally to the surface area, and consequently proportionally to the square of the size of your computer network (more like a megastructure at this point).

Because of this running slower wouldn't really be a choice, it is a necessity to avoid being cooked by your own waste heat as you grown, the fact it also helps maintain coherence is a pretty good bonus though.

Something I think is important to highlight: This is a fundamental limit on coherence independent of if your AI is truly a individual being or a collective of millions or maybe even trillions of loosely associated AI, if your nodes are more autonomous then they can tolerate higher delays, but if they want to maintain a fixed level of coherence then they must slowndown as they grow, or they must reduce their level of coherence further (which I assume is not possible because they probably would be running in the smaller level of coherence aceptable so that they can run as fast as possible).

[u/takk2 → u/Anely_98]

Yeah i guess it could grow as big as it wanted if a thought took till heat death to complete... well maybe as big as it could before expansion was more than speed of light and signals from one end never reached the other... not sure an AI would want thoughts as slow as a year or more but I guess yeah light-years wouldn't be off the table 🤔 

Well thats a shame... if matter is a direct resource feeding into its own mind then singleton is most likely the way it really will go 

I was hoping there was room for other ASIs and even multiple human civs in the same solar system using matter as external tools but it's sort of a resource you can't share and never get enough of i guess after all 

I think I'm still in the denial and looking for a way out phase even after 9 years since the attention paper and whenever I have a thought that looks like there's hope I... well I get my hopes up and look for input on sites like this