Artilects at the Planck scale: Hugo de Garis

According to Hugo de Garis, we will build (and/or become) artilects: Intelligent beings hugely (bazillions of times) smarter than humans.

The process will be gradual, starting with artificial intelligences built in today’s research labs, but at some point the artilects will have to implement themselves in higher-performance nanostructured material substrates.

And why stop there? To achieve higher and higher performance, the artilects will leave nanotech behind and port themselves to new substrates based on femtotech. And then attotech, and so forth, all the way down to the Planck scale. In Hugo’s words, the artilects will “give themselves the option of ‘down-grading’ themselves to achieve vastly greater performance levels.”

“Just how far down they could go is an interesting research question. It should be clear from all this talk of femtotech, attotech, zeptotech, X-tech, etc that as one scales down, in general, performance levels increase dramatically. Hence one can readily speculate that any nano-based artilect, sooner or later, will not be able to compete with his femto-based cousins, and will probably downgrade itself as well. This logic applies all the way down (to Plank-tech?). Hence we come inevitably to the following dramatic conclusion.

The hyper intelligences that are billions of years older than we are in our universe (which is about 3 times older than our sun), have probably ‘downgraded’ themselves to achieve hugely greater performance levels. Whole civilizations may be living inside volumes the size of nucleons or smaller.”

In my book [*] I speculate on these ideas, but Hugo’s speculations came before mine. Before Hugo, Arthur Clarke (who else?) said that very advanced civilizations in the universe could learn how “to store knowledge in the structure of space itself, and to preserve their thoughts for eternity in frozen lattices of light.”

What about God?

Following Arthur Clarke and Hugo de Garis, I think our descendants will port human consciousness to the very bedrock of physical reality, and acquire God-like abilities. Eventually, they will be able to construct whole universes and “satisfy the definition of a deity,” says Hugo. Science “ought to be a lot more open to the idea of deism.”

Hugo rejects theism (“the belief in a deity that also cares about the welfare of individual humans”) though. “Deism I am open to, whereas I find theism ridiculous,” he says.

I disagree.

I think the bedrock of physical reality, which according to current scientific consensus consists of quantum fields, is endowed with free will, elementary consciousness (the ability to experience “what it is like to be”), memory, and the potential for a Cosmic Mind (aka God) able (and willing) to care and intervene now and then. See the last chapters of my book [*] (in particular 20 and 22).

[*] My book “Tales of the Turing Church: Hacking religion, enlightening science, awakening technology” is available for readers to buy on Amazon (Kindle | paperback).

Please buy my book, and/or donate to support other Turing Church projects.

Cover image from Wikimedia Commons.