Down and Fast - A Lunchtime Conversation

Below is a reiteration of many of the points of the last few posts, but compacted in the form of an email I sent my father and my brother after we had lunch and I struggled, as usual, to get all the necessary conceptual infrastructure laid our for a Down and Fast world-making exercise:

Folks—

Fun conversation yesterday…as usual! Below is a written version of one of the more sophisticated ‘sections’ we ran through, because I believe that it is sound, well-grounded in other people’s work, and definitely deserves a second chance because of the significance of its implications.

1) Because of the gonzo upper density limits of computation now being thrown around it is reasonable to talk about a miniaturized model of a human brain taking up a volume of space approximately 10^-4 on a side. We would not have to understand this brain, it would be a faithful imitation of neuronal connectivity and functionality from a ‘black box’ input/output perspective without a comprehensive theory of mind (which may or may not come later).

2) It is quite likely that this ‘mind’ would run at a much greater rate than our own for two very important reasons: a) it is smaller, so signal transfer time from one section to another is intrinsically shorter and faster in linear proportion; b) the connective infrastructure is likely to be ‘wires’ using electronic or photonic signaling which has a speed roughly 1 million times as fast the speed of nerve conduction (10-100 meters per second vs. significant percentage of speed of light); c) the calculative infrastructure of the ‘neurons’ themselves, that part responsible for taking the inputs and creating outputs, will likely be hosted on Gigaherz (or faster) microprocessors which are more than a million times as fast as the same processes in biological neurons (roughly 1000/s).

3) A fast mind is undesirable and possibly useless without a ‘body’ and an ‘environment’ with similar speed factors in which to plan, act and respond. One obvious solution is to create a host body at the same scale as the mind, i.e. at 10^-4. The laws of physics are friendly to this plan, but not always in the same way for each aspect, which leads us to…

4) Gravity: in a vacuum gravity scales perfectly – it takes exactly one ten-thousandth as long for an object to fall to the floor in this hypothetical micro-world. However…

5) Add air and things become very interesting. Some engineers working on new nano-bot designs have described water as being ‘like jello’ and air being ‘like soup’ at these specs. Forward locomotion stops almost instantly when propulsive inputs are ceased…stop and go…stop and go. Surface area effects of all kinds are enormous. The laws of physics are the same, but which ones are important has shifted significantly.

6) Of particular interest is our old well-known friend ‘surface area to volume ratio’. Insect legs are insanely thin and strong and fleas can jump a subjective/relative ‘kilometer’ into the air. This aspect of micro-engineering does help things move roughly faster as size goes down but the graph is hardly well-behaved and there are many mitigating factors like inner limb friction.

7) All this being said, in S’n’K these problems have all already been mostly solved by extending limb-like action into the ‘klowd’ of micro-webs surrounding each individual and by using the ‘lenz’ to virtually augment where accelerated perception is more important than ‘actual’ physical speed. So…

8) In the Narrative there are completely functional ‘worlds’ where subjective time is 10 thousand to a million times faster than at our current level. One underlying trope here is that internal experience is plastic under these different time domains, that is it can function pretty much the way it does now by adapting subjective time within internal experience to match useful speeds to the requirements of the ‘local’ environment. I mentioned some concerns I have for a general theory of mind relative to this point, especially at hugely accelerated rates (i.e. 10^15) but while that is interesting, there is enormous head-room here – to quote the inimitable physicist Richard Feynman “plenty of room at the bottom”.

But what would this mean in socio-historical terms? Well…I could go on at length, but I have already received more of your attention than I deserve so I will just quickly say that it would be catastrophic – in ‘good’ and ‘bad’ senses of that word. To have any sector of a society with that much ‘time’ advantage would truly be like living with hyper-powerful Aliens – one year of our dialog with them could allow them millennia of response time. Their technical development would strip our projections by factors upon factors of magnitude. This is the primary reason for my belief that the arrival times for various technologies (Futurist-proposed) are probably much too long in most cases. Even electronic human-level-capable computation at ‘normal’ scale brings this sort of scenario into play, but the additional significance of the ‘dense’ micro-variant is that it also has the distinct advantage of enormous populations!

--M