An AGI Dyson Swarm will have problems synchronizing its satellites thanks to light speed latency, and this will have major implications for its intelligence and consciousness. A Dyson Swarm is a vast cloud of solar-powered satellites that surround a star in a spherical formation. Each satellite converts light into electricity and then uses it for various tasks. Doubtless, a Swarm would be comprised of many types of satellites that are specialized for different functions, like data processing, communications, or manufacturing space ships. The radius of the Swarm would need to be enormous since the satellites would melt or at least run inefficiently if too close to the star. A radius equal to the Earth’s distance from the Sun, 1 astronomical unit (AU), isn’t unreasonable.
The satellites responsible for data processing will be distributed and will need to communicate with each other, just as the neurons in your brain need to send electrochemical signals to their neighbors to collectively produce intelligent thought. However, if the Swarm has a 1 AU radius, then it will take 17 minutes for a light-speed signal to travel from one end of it to the other, plus another 17 minutes to get any response. While acknowledging the existence of lag within the human brain (e.g. – scientists have measured how long it takes for signals to travel across the brain, and you instinctively understand that it takes time to think to arrive at a solution to a problem), this will be much different: Consider what the processing speeds will be on the futuristic computers emplaced in each satellite. Each computer will be “thinking” so fast that their subjective experience of time will probably be more drawn-out than it is for humans, making a 17-minute communication lag feel like an eternity.
It occurs to me that this discordance would either prevent a Dyson Swarm from having a unitary, coherent consciousness, or give rise to a consciousness that would be very alien from our own (this compounds upon whatever fundamental alienness there is to machine consciousness compared to human). In the former case, it would ensure the Dyson Swarm were comprised of many AGI individuals.
A future step in tech-enhanced human evolution will be dividing our consciousnesses into many directions at once, in turn allowing one person to control multiple bodies simultaneously. One consequence of this is that you’d be able to have sex with yourself.
Autonomous cars will help people easily earn side cash delivering packages. Right after you get into a car and enter your destination, the car’s computer will be able to determine if anyone needs a package delivered from one point to another along your intended route. It would instantly tell you if there were any opportunities to transport packages (or people) for profit and let you decide whether it was worth it.Â
There will also be autonomous cars not designed to carry humans. For example, imagine something smaller than a SmartCar that lacks a steering wheel or seats and is solely designed to deliver food. It might just have one or two little doors that would pop open so a customer could reach inside to get their order.
Thanks to better reaction speeds, machines will be able to drive cars safely under conditions that many humans couldn’t handle. For example, autonomous cars could drive at high speeds while separated from each other by only a few feet. They would coordinate their movements so none of them changed velocity without giving the others time to react. This would allow vehicles to pack together more densely, effectively increasing the capacities of existing roadways.
The losers of the autonomous car revolution include:
- Car insurance companies. Fewer accidents means less need for insurance. The industry will be forced to consolidate and to focus more on selling other products, like homeowners insurance (though if everyone also has a robot butler that can put out fires and fix major plumbing leaks, demand for that type of insurance also drops).
- Traffic police
- Local governments that get revenue from red light cameras, speed cameras, and ticketing drivers for infractions. Â
- Home movers. In the future, you might pay some local guys off Craigslist to load your furniture and other belongings into an autonomous truck, then it would drive itself to the destination, where you’d pay a second group of local guys to unload it. Moving a full house worth of stuff halfway across America can easily cost $10,000 today. The system I described might cut that down by 70-80%.Â
- The car moving industry (e.g. – someone else drives your car across country for you because you moved) will also die out once cars are autonomous.
- Owners of large parking lots, particularly around airports.
If intelligent aliens are visiting Earth, one way they would monitor us is with machines that are the size and shape of insects. It might be that there’s an alien database of DNA from every human who has ever lived, compiled thanks to billions of robot mosquitoes sucking blood from people while they slept. Maybe they’ve got DNA from a beloved pet you had as a child. And depending on how long the aliens have been here, there might even be samples of DNA from extinct species like dinosaurs.
If, generally speaking, consumer technologies and AI will increasingly focus on satisfying individual preferences (e.g. – virtual reality game where you’re the only player and you’re always #1), then why should it extend to the foods and drinks you consume? Continuous surveillance will allow your personal assistant AI to quickly learn your food and drink preferences. Once robot chefs are everywhere, you’ll be able to have your exact favorite meal or sandwich you remember from your childhood anytime. Even if you went into a restaurant or someone else’s house, it would be a simple matter for you to transmit your recipe to the robot chef who was there and have it make something for you, perfectly.
A small step towards this future can be seen in the newer restaurant soda machines that can mix dozens of syrups to make hundreds of kinds of drinks.
With better knowledge of how the human flavor palate works (there is probably some genetic component to this), machines could go a step farther by tweaking your favorite recipes in ways that will make them taste even better, and by recommending new foods and drinks you wouldn’t have tried but will probably love.