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Robots & Immortality

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Thrudd:
You don't need one to have the other.
Immortality means you don't die no matter what happens to you, so no being crushed to death by rocks since being crushed by a few rocks means you were not immortal.

The millions of tons of rocks burying thing is just a blip on the timeline for an immortal entity since you will surface to interesting things happening eventually. So always something to look forward too while whiling away the centuries if stuck in rock strata or much longer if you got stuck in a subduction zone.
It is being stuck in interstellar space where things happen so slowly and on such a vast scale. Talk about boring..... ugh  :facepalm:

Neko_Ali:
What kind of life do you live that you feel getting crushed by millions of tons of rock is inevitable?

Keep in mind that AIs are not immortal when it comes to sustaining damage. Their bodies can be destroyed. Even though they tend to use armored shells for their cores, they can still be destroyed, which would kill them. The only question is whether or not they would die of 'old age'. Normally us flesh and blood types are stuck with one body. Once that body deteriorates enough, it will cease to function. Though it's more likely that people will die of outside forces before that point, be it disease or injury.

AIs on the other hand, so long as their personality core survives can just switch to a new body when the time comes and their old one is no longer suitable. The bigger question is: can their personality and memory be transferred between cores? Eventually whatever storage they are built on will start to fail, likely leading to the robot version of dementia. Even if they were to switch cores, eventually they would have to undergo neural pruning. Otherwise the amount of data stored would become astronomical. Even if data storage maintained pace with how quickly an AI learns they will probably become slower and slower at remembering things as they have to search through hundreds, possibly thousands of years of data. Possibly by that time they will have some sort of 'backup storage module' where they can archive data that isn't relevant to their current life. Remembering that their human companion from 300 years ago liked blueberry waffles with honey doesn't exactly seem important enough to keep stored in the AI equivalent of RAM.

Case:
I'm not sure how much thought Jeph has given the AI-lifespan question outside of what he has posted - but I guess it's safe to say that he's a fan of SF authors who have: e.g. Banks or Stross have written on 'very, very old' AIs becoming 'eccentric' (IIRC, there was a Ship-Mind called Mistake Not... in 'Hydrogen Sonate' that was so prone to seeking out remote stars and 'firegazing' at the plasmastreams that other Minds became concerned. Mistake Not... was only its last call-sign - it was really a very old Mind transferred to a brand-new warship).

If we assume that maintenance of the physical substrate is not an issue, any AI that is comparable to us will also have to undergo one or the other form of memory consolidation & pruning, as RF laid out above. It will be driven to learning and transcending its current self - I'm thinking of the poem 'Stufen' (Steps) by Hermann Hesse - some impulse comparable to what we call curiosity.

If that mind reaches a state where it can no longer transcend itself, it may well be subject to something akin to what we call ennui - and if such a state lasts long enough, it might well decide that enough is enough.

Who wants to live forever?

Is it cold in here?:
Curious entities will want to live as long as there are new things to find out.

We know from Pintsize and Momo's history that QC robots can be backed up and restored onto new hardware of a different model.

Human-AI relations might suffer from human envy at beings exempt from the horrors of aging.

improvnerd:
There's two things here, and it probably helps to unbundle:

1. Invulnerability -- Inability to be harmed.
2. Immortality -- Freedom from death by natural causes.

Most god-like creatures are both, so we tend to conflate the two.

However it'd be possible to be invulnerable, but have a finite lifespan -- unkillable but eventually dying of old age.

It'd also be possible to be immortal but vulnerable. Like a person benefitting from anti-aging biotechnology. You wouldn't die of natural causes, but you would still be as vulnerable as any other human to poison, fire, gunshots, etc.

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