"Vernor Vinge. The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era" - читать интересную книгу автора

But in this brightest and kindest world, the philosophical
problems themselves become intimidating. A mind that stays at the same
capacity cannot live forever; after a few thousand years it would look
more like a repeating tape loop than a person. (The most chilling
picture I have seen of this is in [18].) To live indefinitely long,
the mind itself must grow ... and when it becomes great enough, and
looks back ... what fellow-feeling can it have with the soul that it
was originally? Certainly the later being would be everything the
original was, but so much vastly more. And so even for the individual,
the Cairns-Smith or Lynn Margulis notion of new life growing
incrementally out of the old must still be valid.

This "problem" about immortality comes up in much more direct
ways. The notion of ego and self-awareness has been the bedrock of
the hardheaded rationalism of the last few centuries. Yet now the
notion of self-awareness is under attack from the Artificial
Intelligence people ("self-awareness and other delusions").
Intelligence Amplification undercuts our concept of ego from another
direction. The post-Singularity world will involve extremely
high-bandwidth networking. A central feature of strongly superhuman
entities will likely be their ability to communicate at variable
bandwidths, including ones far higher than speech or written messages.
What happens when pieces of ego can be copied and merged, when the
size of a selfawareness can grow or shrink to fit the nature of the
problems under consideration? These are essential features of strong
superhumanity and the Singularity. Thinking about them, one begins to
feel how essentially strange and different the Post-Human era will be
-- _no matter how cleverly and benignly it is brought to be_.

From one angle, the vision fits many of our happiest dreams:
a time unending, where we can truly know one another and understand
the deepest mysteries. From another angle, it's a lot like the worst-
case scenario I imagined earlier in this paper.

Which is the valid viewpoint? In fact, I think the new era is
simply too different to fit into the classical frame of good and
evil. That frame is based on the idea of isolated, immutable minds
connected by tenuous, low-bandwith links. But the post-Singularity
world _does_ fit with the larger tradition of change and cooperation
that started long ago (perhaps even before the rise of biological
life). I think there _are_ notions of ethics that would apply in such
an era. Research into IA and high-bandwidth communications should
improve this understanding. I see just the glimmerings of this now
[32]. There is Good's Meta-Golden Rule; perhaps there are rules for
distinguishing self from others on the basis of bandwidth of
connection. And while mind and self will be vastly more labile than in
the past, much of what we value (knowledge, memory, thought) need
never be lost. I think Freeman Dyson has it right when he says [9]:
"God is what mind becomes when it has passed beyond the scale of our