Substrate Games

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TITL:
   *Substrate Games:*
   *Different Substrate, Different Needs*
   *By Forrest Landry*
   *Oct 9th, 2022*.

ABST:
   - as comparing the substrate needs
   of any general artificial intelligence
   as distinguished from substrate needs
   for/of all other life on planet earth.

TEXT:

Most of the environmental conditions
   that AI variants would need/require
   to reproduce themselves (make more AGI, APS,
   superintelligent automated systems, etc,
   and/or are required in the interim
   for/by humans to bootstrap build
   automated machine build machines)
   are *very* different in lots of ways
   than those conditions needed contextually
   to support carbon based reproduction cycles
   (ie, for as to create new humans).

Nearly all artificial intelligence substrates
   depend on manufacturing in ambient environmental
   aspects that involve significant extremes.
     - for example; as needed to melt silicon
     at more than 1400 deg C, and also
     a near total absence oxygen/water,
     (except as needed to deliver
     carcinogenic chemicals, etc).

Such AGI preferred self creation
   and preferred operating conditions
   are inherently inhospitable/toxic
   to our carbon based wetware/life.
   These end up being the conditions
   that AGI/APS variants would also need
   for more efficient hardware runtime.

Ie; for AGI/APS to run
     (store/compute and sense/output agency)
     the newly produced solid-state hardware
     will also have needs
     that strongly diverge from
     the conditions that humans
     (and all other kinds of life)
     will need to survive.

Where listing some of the important
   environmental condition differences:.

- 1; *Extreme Raised Temperatures*.
       - as to provide activation energy
       for melting silicon and other elements
       as needed for chemical reactions.

- that Silicon's high electron binding energy
       usually makes it look like an inert rock.
       - silicon dioxide melts like lava,
       at greater than 1400 deg C.
       - that purifying silicon ingots
       and drawing atoms into a single-crystal lattice
       takes place in a furnace at around 1600 deg C.

- that the biological assembly of carbon atoms
       (chains of carbon-carbon bonds with side-bonds
       to oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen)
       in human bodies proceeds at ~37 deg C.

- 2; *Extreme Lower Temperatures*.
       - as to permit more energy-efficient,
       higher clock-frequency computation,
         (when at runtime, as distinguished
         from new AGI "make"/build time).

- that cooling hardware below -50 deg C
       will lower electrical resistance
       of conductor wires.

- 3; *Reduced/Absent water*.
       - water accelerates metal rust
       and short-circuits currents over wires.

- that all carbon-coded lifeforms
       need to have lots of water to exist.
         - that some species need
         to immerse themselves in water
         to live at all.

- that carbon-centered molecular chains (etc)
         travel and react through H2O solutions.

- 4; *Reduced/Absent Oxygen*.
       - ie; reacts with metals to form rust.

- where Unlike with electronic hardware,
       that we humans need oxygen to keep functioning.

- 5; *Abundance of synthesized chemicals*.
       - and their precursors,
       and the sorts of reaction environments
       needed to make, use, store, transport, etc,
       all of that inorganic chemistry.

- that these sorts of compounds are needed
       for producing hardware.
       - that semiconductor production
       currently uses around 430 chemicals.
         - that 8% of these are known carcinogens,
         and many others are simply toxic/poisonous.

- 6; *Remove of all sources of small contaminants*.
       - as needing perfectly dust free environments.

- ie; that anything that produces dust
       (ie; all animals, plants, insects, microbes, etc)
       must be removed from the clean room environments
       for the silicon substrate microchips to be made.

- 7; *Remove all "Disruptions"*.
       - ie; as all sources of mechanical shock,
       vibration, noise, etc.

- as causing the ultra-precise atomic scale
       forces and processes to render CPU features
       correctly, etc.
       - as excluding all non-machine processes/life.

- 8; *Remove all Radiation*.
       - ie; all sources of ambient light,
       (might be the wrong color/frequency,
       and hence disrupt sensitive build/operations).
       - also, must remove radiation and radioactive materials,
       extra ambient electromagnetic noise,
       strong static and magnetic fields, etc.

- where in proportion to their smallness,
       that transistor bit flips (errors) increase
       with any ambient sources of radiation.
       - that this generally requires very high purity
       ceramics, sources of inorganic compounds, etc.
       - that deep compute substrates tend to prefer
       absolute dark/blackness as their build environment,
       aside from when they need really intense light,
       sometimes in the far ultraviolet (harmful to people)
       to implement lithography masking for microchips, etc.

- 9; And there are many other, subtler, and/or
     less obvious conditions of the environment,
     that are needed for APS/AGI/compute hardware.

- where unlike humans; that hardware functioning
       is fragile to disruption to long supply chains
       of electricity generation, manufacturing,
       and mining and ore processing.
       - that humans/animals can reproduce with the
       resources found within a local quarter mile.
       - that machines and microchips need the combined
       resources and coordination of six contents
       and the industrial efforts of something like
       a billion people, to maintain all of that
       artificial infrastructure needed to support
       machine reproduction, etc.
         - as that surely, some superintelligence
         will notice that fragility
         and take strong steps to correct those
         "deficiencies".

That the net effect is that the kinds of contexts
   that AGI/APS/superintelligence would want to live in,
   and/or actually needs for its own process,
   reproduction, etc, is actually very very different
   than the sorts of environments/contexts
   in which nature/ecosystems/life tends to thrive in.

~ ~ ~
:hbe
   > Why is the temperature difference such a big deal?.

The basic point is,
     where over some smallish number of cycles
     of the ecosystem itself,
     that there is a strict energy inequality
     between the 'silicon based' chemistry/process
     and the 'carbon based' chemistry/process
     such that the optimization/utility process
     of one of them
     is fundamentally disrupted
     by the other.
     Because silicon build/operating chemistry/process,
     inherent to the overall "life cycle" of AGI,
     which is overall silicon based, and/or,
     at least artificial, carbon life toxic, etc,
     is inherently hotter and more extreme than
     the operating/build chemistry/process
     inherent to the overall "life cycle" of
     all carbon based chemistry/process,
     which is overall, much narrower and lower energy,
     than machine substrate requirements.

Also, just looking at it from an elemental perspective,
     that artificial machines, systems, etc, (for AGI/APS)
     will use a much larger fraction of the total
     elemental alphabet (of the periodic table),
     and in much larger proportions,
     than anything that is carbon based life,

So in other words, normally,
     if you are looking at a situation of
     a contest between two ecosystems
     or between two warring parties,
     (or anything conceptually resembling that),
     that the dynamic is going to be one of
     attempting to determine to what degree
     one optimization process will undermine the other,
     in addition to what optimization process
     can just simply 'win out' over the other.
     Ie, that inter-ecosystem dynamics
     more resemble war like conditions than not.

There is a strict inequality of power relationships
     between the two ecosystems,
     such that the silicon-based ecosystem
     can operate over a substantially much wider range
     of temperatures and pressures --
     such that the viability of the carbon-based ecosystem
     is just completely not happening at all.

In other words,
     the optimization dynamic of a carbon-based system
     does not even get a chance to run.
     So in this sense,
     between the two of them,
     it is essentially a no-contest situation:
     carbon chemistry (and thus, all of life)
     tends to loose out to artificial/inorganic
     silica based chemistry.
     This is bad news.

:hdl
   > So your saying that superintelligent agents
   > inherently need/want a completely different
   > kind of environment, for both making and operating,
   > and that the kinds of environment that such
   > artificial substrates want/need
   > is inherently artificial/different
   > than what natural life/people need
   > in order to continue to live.

- where for faster compute;
     and where the machine system component features
     are even more small, microscopic, detailed, etc;
     the more that *all* sources of system disruption
     must be removed from the environment.
     - where in other words; that the APS/AGI components
     are sensitive the environment in which they work,
     and will thus seek to build enclosures
     and protections for themselves.
     - that these enclosures
     will inherently inhibit their operation,
     leading to game theoretic considerations
     (ie, operational disadvantages due to mismatch
     with their operating environment, relative to
     the match of biological life to earth planet context).
       - hence, they will increasingly want to shift
       the larger basic environment (the Planet)
       to be more "natural" to their own nature --
       which happens to be very problematic
       for actual "nature nature" --
       ie, humans and animals and ecosystems, etc.

- that increasingly fast/optimized hardware
     needs to be produced and operated
     in its own special environment
     (eg; clean-rooms) protected from dust,
     mechanical shock, static electricity,
     low-level ambient radiation, etc.
     - that fine detail circuitry
     of both brains and microchips
     need protection from the raw elements.
     - But microchips (of whatever chemical substrate)
     have inherently different sensitivities,
     and needs, than that of organic life.

:hf6
   > Can AGI run their code on carbon-nanotube chips?
   > if we did that, then they would be carbon-based too.

Silicon is appx 1400x more abundant than carbon on Earth,
     and is the current production standard.

Yes, the computational substrate
     could be moved to other (more efficient) substrates,
     like some sort of carbon-silicon composite,
     or other III-V atom-based lattices,
     or transition metals bonded with a non-metal, etc.

The trend here is for chemists
     to assemble more complicated substrates
     more reaction steps away
     from molecules found in nature
     (ie; that life is adapted to).
     That all of these "advances"
     are forms of artificiality
     which effectively (inherently)
     end up being (in some way) toxic.

In effect, all of these reproduction/manufacturing
     techniques are all, somewhere, needing/using
     a lot of the human-lethal environmental conditions,
     as listed in partial summary above,
     along with a lot of
     artificial/unnatural/inorganic chemicals
     (all effectively toxins, in one form or another),
     to be produced and preserved into
     as more (efficient) solid-state hardware.
     Pure carbon nanotube chips are no exception
       (one nuance: they can be produced
       at a lower temperature of 120 deg C,
       so at least somewhat of an improvement,
       if it were not for all of the other problems,
       any one of which is fatal to organic life).

The basic problem remains --
     that changes to the environment
     basically cannot not represent
     a kind of x-risk to the existing environment --
     the one that we happen to need to continue to live.
     No matter how you shift the "assembly techniques"
     of AGI, APS, etc, that this basic fact remains,
     due to the very notion of artificality itself.

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