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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Heap Thaumaturgist" data-source="post: 248320" data-attributes="member: 4516">Well, if anybody really welcomes the coming of the metal gods with open arms, I have some questions to their fundamental sanity.Perfection of form and perfection of efficiency are fundamentally inhuman concepts.  I think most serious thinkers would eventually come to agreement on that one.If I thought about it long enough, the argument that a robotic God-Mind would come to a conclusion of a perfect governmental system could draw to that ... the God-Mind could quite possibly come to the conclusion that the most perfect system it could create is the removal of itself from human affairs.Curious.Contemplation on the creation of perfect human form and perfect human society has come, time and again, to the conclusion that it wouldn't work.  We are, by nature, limited beings.  Perhaps that limitation is, in itself, a gift.  What if we did find a way to create an ever-growing machine intellect ... and found that they invariably went insane trying to comprehend the vastness of infinity.  What if they didn't, and that was worse?  What if we create humanistic intellects and find out that something built to think like us ... turns out like us?  And that, after a certain point, it has to stop learning.Time and again, we find that things we don't understand are more complex than we would have ever dreamed.  Things, cells, atoms, electrons, neutrons, subatomic particles ... what is the nature of thought?  What will we discover about the sublety behind the reasons we think the way we do?The human mind is a strange thing.  When we're young, we learn with an impossible speed and grace that, just as oddly, drops away as we age.  The subtleties of language are astounding, more complex than high level mathematics ... but every average child learns at least one language by the time they're six.  It becomes hard-wired into our neural pathways in a way that doesn't happen after about 13.  Even people with an aptitude for languages won't learn a language as easily nor completely as a child of six knows his own language.  Why do we stop learning like this?  Why does the brain change chemistry and structure?  Is there, perhaps, a reason we don't comprehend yet?  What if we create something that learns as fast as a child for its entire lifespan?  What if we create a chemical that allows the brain to continue functioning at that speed?  Childhood doesn't have "side effects", but I imagine something like that would.  Do I know what?  No.  Gut instinct, maybe.  Plant compounds we synthesize and simplify tend to have side effects that the plant compound did not.  Plant compounds we think should not have any side effects have side effects we can't readily explain.  I don't think caution is a knee jerk reaction.  --HT</blockquote>

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