= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
DeterminateJacobian comments on Maybe you want to maximise paperclips too - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (29)
Heh, clever. In a sense, iron has the highest entropy (atomically speaking) of any element. So if you take the claim that an aspect of solving intergalactic optimization problems involves consuming as much negentropy as possible, and that the highest entropy state of space time is low-density iron (see schminux's comment on black holes), then Clippy it is. It seems though like superintelligent anything-maximizers would end up finding even higher entropy states that go beyond the merely atomic kind.
...Or even discover ways that suggest that availability of negentropy is not an actual limiter on the ability to do things. Does anyone know the state of that argument? Is it known to be true that the universe necessarily runs out of things for superintelligences to do because of thermodynamics?
There is a theoretical limit on how much negentropy is required to erase a bit. However, it depends on temperature. Unless the expansion of the universe has a limit, the universe will get arbitrarily cold, and computers could be arbitrarily efficient. Theoretically, you could make a finite amount of energy last an infinite number of computations.
I take it's a lower limit? Your statement might be misinterpreted with those unfamiliar with the mathematical usage of the term "limit".
The last question was asked for the first time, half in jest, on May 21, 2061 ...
Empirically we seem to be converging on the idea that the expansion of the universe continues forever (see Wikipedia for a summary of the possibilities), but it's not totally slam-dunk yet. If there is a Big Crunch, then that puts a hard limit on the time available.
If - as we currently believe - that doesn't happen, then the universe will cool over time, until it gets too cold (=too short of negentropy) to sustain any given process. A superintelligence would obviously see this coming, and have plenty of time to prepare - we're talking hundreds of trillions of years before star formation ceases. It might be able to switch to lower-power processes to continue in attenuated form, but eventually it'll run out.
This is, of course, assuming our view of physics is basically right and there aren't any exotic possibilities like punching a hole through to a new, younger universe.
Baring unknown physics, it is absolutely slam-dunk known that the universe ends in a big freeze, not a great crunch. Perlmutter et al got the nobel prize in 2011 for discovering that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, due to an unknown effect called for now dark energy. Unless there is some future undiscovered transition, the end of the universe will be cold and lonely, as even the nearest galaxies eventually red shift to infinity.
I don't remember the exact math, but I believe that it was shown that in an expanding and cooling universe, the amount of energy available at any one spot drops over time, but so long as some distant future energy could slow down it's thinking process and energy use arbitrarily, that you could live forever in subjective time by steadily slowing down the objective speed of your thought process over time. The Last Computer (or energy being, or whatever) would objectively go a longer and longer time between each thought, but from a subjective point of view it would be able to continue forever.
Of course, if the rate of the universe's expansion steadily accelerates indefinitely, that might not work, energy might fall off at too fast of a rate for that to be possible. We don't really know enough about dark energy yet to know how that's going to go.