Totalitarian nano-control

At Is CRN Playing Politics there is an old discussion of how nano should be controlled. The CRN position (at least at that stage) was that centralised control is the preferred option. The discussion shows pretty quickly that centralised control over nano in practice would mean totalitarian control over pretty much all modern technology and all computers. It is obvious that any government that got that sort of power would never relinquish it. And with nano nobody would ever be able to take it from them. Sad. Need to think better policies...

Singularity

He-he. :) Usually I found most of what Michael Anissimov wrote insightful and interesting. But this post about the Singularity is utter nonsense. Uncofortable with its unpredictability he tried to make a  case that human values could survive through it. :)

If I were the first superintelligence, I can tell you what I would do. I would rationally evaluate every aspect of my personality, improving it using Pareto optimisation and stronger forms of optimisation. I would develop and install powerful decision making subroutines that would ensure every decision I make is as close to optimal as possible. I would use these subroutines to evolve rapidly.

There is no single human value that I expect to keep. Books are of no use to superintelligence. Love and sex are something many of us already want to get rid of, a dark vestige of our evolutionary past. Games are inferior forms of Monte-Carlo simulations and evolutionary algorithms. Work will no longer be needed, thought alone would accomplish everything I might ever need. And the food I would need would be measured in ergs, not in calories...

The Singularity is not unpredictable. One thing we can certainly be sure of - change. Lots and lots of it. That's what you can expect after the Singularity.