Words&Dirt

“Brutishness is a lesser thing than vice, even though it is more frightening, for the better part [of the soul] has not been ruined in the case of a brute animal, as it has been in a human being who is vicious; rather, the brute animal does not have that better part.  It is similar, then, to comparing an inanimate thing to an animate one, as to which is worse: baseness that does not possess its own starting point [or principle] is always less harmful than that which does possess it, and intellect is such a starting point.  Is is akin, then, to comparing injustice itself to an unjust human being, for there is a way in which each is worse than the other: a bad human being could produce ten thousand times more bad things than could a brute animal.”

––Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Robert C. Bartlett and Susan D. Collins, Book 7, Chapter 6

“‘The Matrioshka brains––it’s a standard part of the stellar life cycle.  Life begets intelligence, intelligence begets smart matter and a singularity.  I’ve been doing some thinking about it.  I figure the singularity stays close to home in most cases, because bandwidth and latency time put anyone who leaves at a profound disadvantage.  In effect, the flip side of having such huge resources close to home is that the travel time to other star systems becomes much more daunting.  So they restructure the entire mass of their star system into a free-flying shell of nanocomputers, then more of them, Dyson spheres, shells within shells, like a Russian doll: a Matrioshka brain.  Then Economics 2.0 or one of its successors comes along and wipes out the creators.  But.  Some of them survive.  Some of them escape that fate…Somewhere out there we will find the transcendent intelligences, the ones that survived their own economic engines of redistribution––engines that redistribute entropy if their economic efficiency outstrips their imaginative power, their ability to invent new wealth.'”

––Accelerando, by Charles Stross, loc. 5218