[LINK] "Possible Psychology of a Matrioshka Brain"

[rfmcdonald]

Eric Schwitzgebel's New APPS Blog post from October speculating about the possible drives of a Matrioshka brain--briefly, a planet-sized supercomputer powered by the energy of a sun--is wonderful. What would it do, and why?

Enclose the sun inside a layered nest of thin spherical computers. Have the inmost sphere harvest the sun's radiation to drive computational processes, emitting waste heat out its backside. Use this waste heat as the energy input for the computational processes of a second, larger and cooler sphere that encloses the first. Use the waste heat of the second sphere to drive the computational processes of a third. Keep adding spheres until you have an outmost sphere that operates near the background temperature of interstellar space.

Congratulations, you've built a Matrioshka Brain! It consumes the entire power output of its star and produces many orders of magnitude more computation per microsecond than all of the current computers on Earth do per year.

[. . .]

A common theme in discussions of super-duper-superintelligence is that we can have no idea what such a being would think about -- that a being so super-duper would be at least as cognitively different from us as we are from earthworms, and thus entirely beyond our ken. But I'd suggest (with Nick Bostrom, Eric Steinhart, and Susan Schneider) that we can think about the psychology of vast supercomputers. Unlike earthworms, we know some general principles of mentality; and, unlike earthworms, we can speculate, at least tentatively, about how these principles might apply to entities with computational power that far exceeds our own.

So...

Let's begin by considering a Matrioshka Brain planfully constructed by intelligent designers. The designers might have aimed at creating only a temporary entity -- a brief art installation, maybe, like a Buddhist sand mandala. These are, perhaps, almost entirely beyond psychological prediction. But if the designers wanted to make a durable Matrioshka Brain, then broad design principles begin to suggest themselves.

Read the rest of the post for insight.