Thank you for taking the time to write this out. I've long since given up having any debate with people on these subjects so it's heartening to see some still flying the flag.
One video in that archive is about a family day out to and island by ferry. You'd basically arrive in the morning, climb to the top of the hill on the island, have lunch and meet the ferry in the afternoon. The first thing that strikes you is that no-one is fat. The second that everyone is fit enough to make it to the top of the hill regardless of age.
My flow is the AI writes most of the code, I closely review, question and tweak everything that comes out. My commits are about the same size as they were. Don't vibe code or one shot features.
Thank you! I'm in WA, so in some respects if I'm not driving a landie or hilux my bogan creds are still somewhat lacking, but at least I'm looking down on Ranger drivers now lol.
This right here is my view on the future as well. Will the AI write the entire feature in one go? No. Will the AI be involved in writing a large proportion of the code that will be carefully studied and adjusted by a human before being used? Absolutely yes.
This cyborg process is exactly how we're using AI in our organisation as well. The human in the loop understands the full context of what the feature is and what we're trying to achieve.
Laser accelerate a lightweight probe, probe lands on alien planet and self replicates a receiver and basic robot body. Send mind in the form of information at speed of light and download into robot body.
Something roughly along these lines was believable enough for the Altered Carbon universe.
Landing from relativistic speed would be a massive engineering problem, since you won't have a laser de-celerator on the other end. And landing on a planet would seem to require a rocket, which cannot be lightweight.
Not necessarily insoluble, but a massive unsolved problem.
Show us how to build machines, create factories, mines, chip fabs, etc., smelt steel, and so forth out of those bacteria and cells and you might have a point.
So what? Dilithium + antimatter + magic space warping was enough for the Star Trek universe. The sky is the limit for science fiction.
Just in that first paragraph:
- How do you stop at the other end? There won't be a large laser array at the receiving end and a laser probe will not have enough stored energy to decelerate itself.
- How exactly do you download a mind to be transmitted? We can't do it right now to be sure, and it's not clear we could ever accurately do that depending on how finely detailed a human brain is.
- How do you transmit it reliably over several hundred light years? Background radiation alone is enough to drown out any signal after a few dozen light years no matter how good your transmission is. Also, when do you start sending? You cannot possibly know which probes survived. (you DID send out at least a few hundred probes right? Don't forget to multiply laser energy requirements by the amount of probes)
- How does the receiving end download a mind into a robot body? We can't even begin to do that on Earth, not even with worms or flies. Humans are right out.
- How do we power the lasers? Conservative estimates have put required laser power at several gigawatts at least. Current laser systems can do that in pulsed mode but only with extremely low duty cycles. Getting enough power together to supply millions of homes would be tricky to say the least. (and see the note above about needing multiple probes just to be on the good side of probability)
- How does the probe survive decades of ultrahard radiation? What about dust it will encounter at high-subluminal speeds, also for decades? The shielding for that won't be lightweight, but the heavier the probe gets the more difficult it will be to accellerate.
- The satellite which is light enough to be powered by lasers also contains the most magical 3d printer anyone has ever seen. You can't just pull the molecules for advanced processors and energy generation equipment out of the air, such a probe would need to set up significant mining industries all on its own without any human interaction.
- A basic robot body. Keep in mind that "picking up a keychain and choosing the right key out of it without dropping the whole keychain" is already a challenge for modern robots.
In short, it'll be several centuries before humanity even gets close to such a project. I'd like to be wrong, but it seems extremely unlikely anyone of us will see such a thing in our lifetime.
It is very unlikely indeed, because we are not trying. We have a world set up so as to allow a few people to accrue wealth they couldn't possibly need, by impoverishing everyone else. Where are they going to make money out of this?
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