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leplen comments on For FAI: Is "Molecular Nanotechnology" putting our best foot forward? - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (117)
I am sufficiently certain it's impossible. I don't care how intelligent something is, physical law wins. You can't trick the conservation of energy. You can't run nuclear reactions on your hard-drive, no matter how you spin it.
I would rate the possibility of unicorns orders of magnitudes higher than the possibility of being able to assemble femtotech using my hard disk. It is more probable that that is impossible than it is probable that I am actually composing this post.
I've read at least one science fiction story predicated on the idea that the A.I., within a few moments of waking up, discovers a heretofore unknown principle of physics and somehow uses them as its gateway to freedom, in one case by actually controlling the components of its hardware to manipulate the newly discovered tachyon field or whatever.
Whether or not this scenario as stated is plausible is less important than the underlying question: How much of basic physics do you think humans have already figured out? If your answer is that we've already discovered 95% of the true laws of physics, then I can see how you would be skeptical. However, if you're wrong and there is actually something fundamental that we're missing because we're just too stupid, then you can be assured that an arbitrarily powerful A.I. would not miss it, and would figure out how to exploit it.
We're pretty good at physics. The g-factor for an electron is 2.0023193043622(15). That number is predicted by theory and measured experimentally, and both give that exact same result. The parentheses in the last 2-digits denote that we're not totally sure those last two numbers are a one and a five due to experimental error. There are very few other human endeavors where we have 12 or 13 decimal places worth of accuracy. While there's still a lot of interesting consequences to work out, and people are still working on getting quantum mechanics and general relativity to talk to each other, any new quantum physics is going to have to be hiding somewhere past the 15th decimal point.
No, they are the standard deviation on the previous digits, i.e. we're 68% sure that the g-factor is between 2.0023193043607 and 2.0023193043637.
Prime Intellect, right?
That particular story was made somewhat more plausible because the chips were already based on a newly-discovered, ill-understood physical principle that contradicted normal quantum mechanics. It's pretty likely humanity would have made the same discoveries, the AI just made them faster.
That's the one.
As far as "missing physics" goes, I still feel that it's a tad hubristic to assert that we've got everything nailed down just because we can measure electron mass very precisely. There could always be unknown unknowns, phenomena which we haven't seen before because we haven't observed the conditions under which they would arise. There could simply be regularities in our observations which we don't detect, like how both Newton's laws and relativity are obvious-in-hindsight but required genius intellects to be first observed.