A reminder for everyone: on this day in 1983, Stanislav Petrov saved the world.
It occurs to me this time around that there's an interesting relationship here - 9/26 is forgotten, while 9/11 is remembered. Do something charitable, and not patriotic, sometime today.
You say we aren't good at finding substitute resources. This may be so.
In the absence of civilization bigger brains where a robust trend among hominids for millions of years. Bigger can be better when it comes to smarts.
And the whole idea of transhuman intelligences being so dangerous is that they are so because intelligence is overpowered in our universe. Would you feel safe dumping say an AI that was quite a bit beyond genius level on a resource starved rock (if stripped of all knowledge beyond that of stone age humans)?
The additional marginal value of human-architectured intelligence is questionable outside of a modern context. See http://www.gwern.net/Drug%20heuristics#modafinil
And were you aware that your trend broke down 30,000 years ago, and the brain has shrunk?
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