The multi-self team

Can you imagine yourself in competition for resources with ... yourself?

There are several future cases where multiple copies of people may be quite likely and normal. Multiple personal instances could arise to repair medical damage, to make a backup, to have a physical and a digital version, to extend the capability of an individual and because the technology exists, to name a few possibilities. Regulation and legal rights of multiple personal instances are interesting issues but not considered here.

It is likely that there will always be some scarcity of resources whether tangible (matter, energy, processing power, etc.) or intangible (status, reputation, attention, etc.). So it is likely that individuals and groups will always compete for resources.

Whether in the physical domain, digital domain or across domains, if you have copies of yourself, you will be competing with yourself for resources.

Initially, you will know exactly what your other self is thinking and strategizing and you might share resources effectively.

Then, although identical at the outset, any copies, if not mind-synced, will increasingly diverge. In situations of multiple personal instances, regular mind-syncing will probably be desirable but there will be many cases where this will not be possible or desired.

Even if two copies of the same entity are experiencing the same situation, it will not be equal in interpretation by both, the physical experience will not be completely equivalent and the mental experience will be even more different with the randomness of the brain and micro differences in cell chemical states triggering different experiences and interpretations.

Divergence in experience and interpretation could lead to divergence of goals. As with any current or historical examples of resource competition, divergent goals lead to destruction or collaboration.

The multi-self team
An optimal and evolutionarily superior final state would be one's selves coming together in a new entity, a multi-self team, a pool of many nuances of self and abilities, a borg being broader and more capable than any individual.

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.