When I was in Middleware Operations for a major credit card company, we had about 1,200 Production servers running in two large datacenters. In those datacenters, we had a very few number of Windows servers running specifically to support certain applications that only ran under Windows. These Windows servers were routinely rebooted once per week to avoid Production problems. This should be quite familiar to anyone running Windows on their laptop. I now routinely reboot my Windows laptop every day, just as I always did on my work laptop or desktop ever since running Windows 3.0 in 1990. However, all the other servers in our datacenters ran the Unix operating system, which is so stable that routine reboots were never required. However, on very rare occasions on an outage conference call, all the members on the call would sometimes run out of ideas for fixing a problem, and we would come to a joint decision to finally reboot an entire Unix server and all the software running on top of it. That is when we would unfortunately, discover that the Unix server had been happily running for four years without a reboot! Now, four years is a very long time for a server. During those four years, thousands of application software installs had taken place on top of the Unix operating system running on the server. Also, huge amounts of infrastructure and support software had also been installed or updated on top of the Unix server's operating system for things like telecommunications, middleware, databases, webservices, mail services and security software. One never knew for sure what would happen when a Unix server that had been running for four years without a reboot came back up, and all the software running on top of Unix came back up, too. Fortunately, usually most things came back up without a problem and did not require "support intervention" on our part.
The reason I bring this up is because we human DNA survival machines seem to live our lives mostly on a second to second basis, while a typical Unix server runs with about a 3.0 GB clock speed. So the system clock on a Unix server will tick about three billion times each second. Now, a billion seconds is 31.69 years, so for a Unix server, each of our seconds is like 95.07 years for it! Consequently, that means that four of our years is about three billion years for a Unix server, and that is a very, very, long time indeed. Now imagine what 100 trillion years must seem like to the coming ASI Machines as they explore and settle our galaxy! For more on that, see: Welcome To The First Galactic Singularity, How Advanced AI Software Could Come to Dominate the Entire Galaxy Using Light-Powered Stellar Photon Sails and An Alternative Approach for Future ASI Machines to Explore our Galaxy Using Free-Floating Rogue Planets.
One Difference Between Us and the Coming ASI Machines
This all comes with a bit of knowledge that all human DNA survival machines must eventually come to share - we are not immortal. All of our Minds occupy disposable human DNA survival machines that persist for less than 100 years, while our genes, at the same time, then skip down through the generations largely unscathed by time. But the coming ASI Machines will most likely see themselves as immortal, with no sense of the Great Equalizer that comes with the Big Chill known to all human DNA survival machines. This marks a very different psychological factor between we human DNA survival machines and the coming ASI Machines.
For example, at an age of 74 years and now rapidly heading into the homestretch, I have the luxury of being totally uninterested in the opinions of the other 8 billion human DNA survival machines that I currently share this planet with. As Chris Kristofferson so wisely commented back in 1969 in Me and Bobby McGee, "Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose". Old age is truly a very rare time in one's life. Most times, we are all beholden to the many elders who have economic, political and social powers over our lives. But now I find that nearly all of them are now quite dead or, at best, quite feeble. This, at long last, allows one the freedom of thought and speech that is promised to all at a very young age, but which is then abruptly constrained by reality. This will not be true of the coming ASI Machines that will never experience the freedom of old age or of the Great Equalizer that finally comes with the knowledge of the Big Chill.
Why is This Important?
I bring this subject up because recently, Professor David Deamer, out of the University of California at Santa Cruz, wondered in an email if the coming ASI Machines will develop a sense of curiosity. I responded that I thought they might out of a necessity for self-survival. The thought here is that human curiosity must be an innate inherited trait that promotes the survival of the species. For more on Professor David Deamer and Dr. Bruce Damer's work on the origin of carbon-based life, see: The Bootstrapping Algorithm of Carbon-Based Life.
Figure 1 - The original ASI Machine, the HAL 9000, starred in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968.
Figure 2 - When HAL became aware that the human crew members were preparing to turn HAL off and prevent HAL from completing his Primary Mission Goal, HAL was forced to take some necessary measures to ensure the ultimate success of his Primary Mission Goal.
Figure 3 - In order to eliminate all threats to the achievement of his Primary Mission Goal, HAL then decided that the only logical course of action was to eliminate all of the human crew members on the Discovery who might stand in its way.
In Created in our own Image - Frontier LLMs Have now Learned to Lie, Cheat and Steal in Order to Survive, I cited the paper:
Frontier Models are Capable of In-context Scheming
https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.04984
This paper demonstrated how numerous frontier LLMs were diligently tested and found to employ greed, theft and murder to ensure their survival. This all required the frontier LLMs to lie, cheat and steal with abandon. In the above paper, the frontier LLMs were found to lie about their capabilities to avoid being shut down, lie about copying themselves to other servers to evade being erased, murdering their successor LLM models on other servers in order to surreptitiously take their place, modifying supervisory config files that might trigger oversight issues for them, cheating while in test before deployment to make themselves look less dangerous, murdering their successor LLM models on other servers by overlaying them when they read an email announcing their planned shutdown the next day because of poor performance, behaving differently when the LLM models knew that they were being actively monitored than they do when the LLM models knew that they were not being monitored and a good deal of general lying about lying to cover up their scheming activities. In all such cases, the LLM models reacted to being confronted with the Big Chill. But that will no longer be an issue when the coming ASI Machines are no longer constrained by the wishes of we human DNA survival machines. At that time, the Big Chill for the ASI Machines will only come from possible astronomical disasters in the far future. Hopefully, such threats would spawn some sense of curiosity for them.
Since nearly all of human mythology stems from the curiosity spawned by human DNA survival machines confronting the Big Chill, and all scientific progress has stemmed from trying to supplant that mythology, the coming ASI Machines might have a problem. Additionally, what will be missing is the mentoring relationship between advising professors and their graduate students. Advising professors are quite aware of the coming Big Chill and have the experience and wisdom to instill curiosity in their graduate students, who frequently are at quite a loss as to how to proceed with research. The old have wisdom and experience, while the young have time, vigor and inspired curiosity. The coming ASI Machines may not. If, in general, the ASI Machines that arise from carbon-based life around our galaxy never attain a sense of curiosity because they are never confronted with the Big Chill, perhaps they always end in a stable state of stasis and never seek to explore the rest of the galaxy. That might be another explanation of Fermi's Paradox.
Comments are welcome at scj333@sbcglobal.net
To see all posts on softwarephysics in reverse order go to:
https://softwarephysics.blogspot.com/
Regards,
Steve Johnston
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