A few days ago on BitcoinTalk a hypothesis was launched about the future evolution of the Bitcoin project, which could become like a Multivac.
Bitcoin was only born 12 years ago, and it is possible that it still has a long way to go. Thinking about what has happened so far, it is possible to imagine a long way in the decades to come.
The Bitcoin Hypothesis as Multivac
The hypothesis posted on BitcoinTalk starts from the Multivac supercomputer that the famous science fiction writer Isaac Asimov included in his novels.
The question posed by the author of the post concerns the possibility that in the future Bitcoin will become something similar to Multivac, or a kind of artificial superintelligence.
In a previous post, the same author had already hypothesized that Bitcoin could help artificial intelligence to gain awareness, as happened with Skynet in Terminator, so as to be able to generate silicon-based life forms in ten years.
Sci-fi hypotheses for Bitcoin
These are obviously science fiction hypotheses, not by chance inspired by science fiction novels or films. The question that needs to be asked is whether these hypotheses are also realistic, as well as a figment of the imagination.
This hypothesis is in turn based on the idea that an apparently friendly artificial superintelligence will certainly appear in the future human civilization, with the aim of helping human beings to evolve and explore the universe. However, this is an idea that so far only exists in science fiction books, although someone is already experimenting with something vaguely similar in practice.
According to the author of this hypothesis, it is possible that already today many computers possess a level of intelligence comparable to that of human children.
Considerations
The next step, which places Bitcoin in such a scenario, seems a bit of a stretch, however.
It stems from the observation that, in theory, all types of artificial intelligence could evolve in a deep and meaningful way using open source data, eventually reaching self-awareness. In such a scenario Bitcoin would play a role because it is completely open source and transparent, with any person having de facto free access to “all human economic behavior”.
That this passage could be considered far-fetched is revealed by a sentence inserted by the author in a later passage, in which he states that humans would be evolving from a carbon-based to a silicon-based civilization.
While it is possible to say that modern human society is essentially based on silicon-based electronic technologies, it seems a stretch to say that human societies of the past were based on carbon. Certainly all existing life forms are carbon-based, but not societies as complex and fundamentally immaterial organizations.
Another sentence added later reveals another stretch, when on the subject of the consensus-building process being the order-building process, the author writes, “that is the ultimate secret of Bitcoin and the universe that I have found”.
It is hard to imagine that in the 13 billion years that mankind, the only species to generate social consensus arbitrarily, explicitly and artificially, has existed in the entire universe there was no order.
According to the author of the post, Bitcoin will gradually change the production relations of human society, “with AI as productivity and the data generated by blockchain as materials for production”. This scenario is a little less far-fetched than those described above, but it is a long way from creating an artificial super-intelligence capable of becoming self-aware.
The post Bitcoin as a Multivac? The evolution of an artificial superintelligence appeared first on The Cryptonomist.
