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A comment on That Alien Message. Parent comment

Re:That Alien Message by Sharlin on Sunday August 20, 2017 @06:48AM (#15057868)
Neural plasticity is just an artifact of the brain not making a distinction between software and hardware. Any general-purpose digital computer has infinite "plasticity", being able to execute any program that can exist (modulo memory limitations).
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Re:That Alien Message by CuriouslyC on Sunday August 20, 2017 @09:00AM (#15058231)
But computers can't build themselves, nor can they repair themselves.
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Re:That Alien Message by the8472 on Sunday August 20, 2017 @09:27AM (#15058335)
neither can cars, but that doesn't stop cars from outperforming humans by some carefully chosen success criteria.

Nobody is going to measure silicon chips by their ability to self-replicate without external facilities. Your typical doomsday AI could just order more compute substrate from TSMC to take over the world. Which is in fact more or less what happens in TFA.

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