Ask A Genius 352 – It’s a Big Blob Out There
March 1, 2018
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What about the blob?
Rick Rosner: At some point, once information processes, conscious information processes are decoupled from the human body, it can be easily moved around and merged with other minds or other forms of information processing.
There will probably be an extended period of controversy and struggle, eventual alliances, maybe a settling down after a century or two. The issue will be around how much you will allow your consciousness to be subsumed in some other structure.
There will be a matter of alliances of merging consciousness boundaries. So, your rights once you are merged with a large information processing entity. What are your rights if you have to remove yourself from it in the future?
People will be able or the entity would be able to duplicate their consciousnesses, and will be able to extend a series of them out or venture out with your mind. You can send out a bunch of them and then re-join with them later.
There will be a bunch of issues about entities’ rights to join up with other entities in intimate information processing partnerships or alliances, or the rights to end those alliances. It will be, obviously, complicated.
Eventually, who knows, this is talking out of my butt, but at some point, as things settle down; there will be one or more Earth-spanning massive information processing entities, or as big as is practical – which will be pretty damn big.
Jacobsen: We called this a “blob” before, right? You took on that term.
Rick Rosner: The “super blob,” it could be something that extends for hundreds and thousands of miles across the earth’s surface or into the earth itself or circles the earth via orbiting stuff. One of the priorities will be special compactness; a solid sphere of computation is more efficient than a sheet of computation.
That sheet covering the earth surface because the ball of computation has a lower average distance upon its various component code, and so it can compute faster. We will have vast structures. These structures would be the most powerful computing.
They will be gigantic. They will be the most powerful conscious computing information processing entities that we know of and sub-intelligences, smaller intelligences. There will still be smaller beings in this huge thing.
People can exist as people or whatever forms they want to take and they can go out and do their own computing, which will be super powerful compared to our mental computing now, based on the situation of all your computing as an independent entity is relevant to your situation in the world as an independent entity.
So, there will still be independent entities out in the world making decisions based on their local and specific situations. Independent entities will have a choice as to how much consultation they want to do on a moment to moment basis with the giant, super powerful processor.
Maybe, it’s expensive to have the power of the central processor, working with you as you go about your affairs or maybe it’s not expensive because the central processor finds it helpful to constantly gather information from independent entities that are linked to it.
However, all this stuff will evolve across hundreds of years until you have long periods of world computation. That could be minutes or days or something since every thing’s moving so fast, but we will have a stable, somewhat stable, arrangement about where negotiated computation happens.
Or, you will have stable arrangements that evolved between lesser awarenesses and these big central information processors. At that point, we will be well beyond anything that’s human relationships today, except for people who choose to engage in a throw-back cuddling for the reasons of being technologically Amish or to honor their ancestors.
Maybe, it’s an issue from time to time of safety. If information processing structures are being attacked, then maybe people will lock themselves down and exist without being highly linked to other conscious beings.
But normal human coupling at this point will be a rare thing in the sea of other forms of infinite means of intimately shared information processing. Before that, this is the world of consciousness budding off and merging up into massive central processors.
That’s about three hundred years, four hundred years in the future. So, until then, we have to predict where relationships would go. The first major thing would be any kind of widespread gender judgment or regulations.
Gender will fall as a thing that prescribes the maturity of the relationship you can have. That will fall within most places in the world within a century and then as consciousness becomes more mergeable, couple-hood will fall within a hundred and fifty years or two centuries.
Because there will be all sorts of new ways of merging one’s perception of the world with somebody else or other people. People in Western countries will have things with coupling as being romantic as sex, and then only secondarily for making a family or as for economic stability, to pull in resources.
However, as we gain control of our bodies and minds, relationships will form for reasons beyond sexual romance and sex. We will still have business linkages, defensive linkages, but people will couple up.
People will couple up to share their history with each other. Maybe, somebody has had an unusual experience such as surviving living for years in space or years under water and spending a year of developing some theory.
People would make you want to experience what it’s to be that person who they may be able to sell linkages: either your active consciousness or to form another record of your experiences as you live them.
So, that’s pretty much as far as I can go right now.
There will be coupling for the standard reasons replaced by coupling and tripling and quadrupling and all other forms of coming together for a vast variety of reasons. And then after it, eventually, there’s periods of strife as massive operations of information processing happen and as people try to sort out what role they want to have with the world computing apparatus; and then eventually, that settles down and you have this multi-minded and centrally-minded world-spanning consciousness.
I don’t know, that’s as far as I can go.
[End of recorded material]
Authors[1]
Rick Rosner
American Television Writer
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Editor-in-Chief, In-Sight Publishing
Footnotes
[1] Four format points for the session article:
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- Session article conducted, transcribed, edited, formatted, and published by Scott.
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- Humble, A. (n.d.). Guide to Transcribing. Retrieved from http://www.msvu.ca/site/media/msvu/Transcription%20Guide.pdf.
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Rick Rosner 