Adam Brown: belief

Transcript context

…Okay, so then what are the other constraints on a future civilization that they might care about? If we've got these superhuman intelligences and they're colonizing the galaxy, what are the things they might want to do that they can't do? They probably care about energy. They care about computation. Energy limits. We've talked about the efficiency of batteries and extracting energy. MC squared is the—I'm highly confident that the most energy you can extract from a given piece of matter is MC squared, at least until you start getting cosmology involved. Other limits will be Landauer's limit, or in other words, with a given amount of energy, how useful is a given amount of energy to you? We wouldn't care about having huge amounts of energy if you could get an arbitrary amount of value out of a fixed unit of energy. We think that that's not true. We think that in particular, if we're going to do computations with it, for example, that there's going to be—and that computation makes errors—that there is a fixed cost of a bit, basically a bit of free energy, in order to correct those errors. And we're confident that there's no way to make computers that don't make errors?…

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