So discontinuous a discontinuity

A key aspect of thinking systemically about the future is being able to see how rapidly advancing technologies across many fields interrelate. Whatever next Internet-like discontinuity or singularity occurs will influence whatever comes thereafter. It is likely that some high percentage of what are now thought to be expected future advances will recede or be reshaped at minimum, for example:

• If all chronic disease and aging becomes controllable and there is effective immortality, does uploading matter as much?
• If artificial general intelligence is achieved, how does that change the exigency and requirements of molecular nanotechnology?
• If affordable space launch and space-based solar power is achieved, what happens to ethanol, electrical and other terrestrial alternative vehicle and transportation infrastructure solutions?
• If immersive virtual reality and post-material scarcity are achieved, does molecular nanotechnology matter and what happens to global political systems?
• If whole human genome testing is available, do single SNP tests go away? If there are home health monitors and nanodiagnostics, do primary care physicians go away?

Alt approaches to AGI

50+ year old attempts at creating AGI have not been successful. It is possible that AGI cannot be generated from current methods and technologies; the wrong tool is being used, sort of like trying to build a 747 with a toothbrush. Electromagnetism, silicon and Von Neumann architectures may not ever have the capacity to achieve AGI even allowing for continued increases in processing, storage and memory and architectural shifts such as parallelism.

Other substrates might work
Getting around the rigidity of Von Neumann, mathematical, logic-based, computational approaches, symbolic approaches and traditional computers, other computational substrates like quantum computing, DNA computing, etc. might work and also those that humans have not yet invented, discovered or exploited for this purpose like light, air, memes and information. There must be other substrates, and other viable approaches that are not constrained by mathematics and logic.

Information as a substrate
Narrowly, the only existing example of general intelligence is the human brain and the basic requirements of AGI are self-replication and self-improvement. Considering self-replication, there are many examples of more effective self-replication than humans, for example, memes, disease and microbes. Considering self-improvement, memes also self-improve more effectively than humans as they are refined through repetition, and have the unbounded ceiling for improvement of true AGI.

Taking advantage of the self-reproducing and self-improving properties and using memes and information as a novel computing substrate might be one way of extending AGI progress.

Information as a substrate could be developed symbiotically with a very broadly applicable new understanding of the laws of physics based on information and entropy as opposed to mass and energy.