Science Saturday: Avoiding Catastrophic Boredom

[gbruno]

people dont have complete access to their own schematics. brains have multiple "interested" centers and mutliple "excited" chemicals washing around.

robots that build themselves would know where all the "interested" registers are, and be able to set them to "high" even with nothing happening. So they would sit around and do nothing, but feel great. That seems to be why robots have failed to disperse across the galaxy to visit us. They just filled their "disperse" register to "high". Perhaps a few robots might refuse to "dope" themselves up and set out to see something "really" interesting. But their descendants would always be tempted to tinker.
As Bill Hamilton said, life requi9res 2 drives:
1) to Reproduce and
2) to Disperse.
We might add 3) no ability to completely subvert drives 1 & 2

As Bill Burroughs said, junkies just sit around all day and look at their toes.

Perhaps we might design robots so complex they cant understand themselves. That would be "growth" not just replication. We grow via diffusion in watery cells, which need 8km of atmosphere to filter out radiation. Hard to see how a solid-state robot could grow, without knowing where all its pleasure registers are.