eigenframe

I agree that "determinism" has much to do with the questions here, but to immediately pose a question about "the world" being deterministic might be putting the carriage before the horse.

I think the the other, perhaps more prescient point here, is about whether or not that kind of exponentially-learning AGI being discussed is even possible given that the substrate such things would be embedded in (hardware, software) which are [or appear to be?] deterministic. One assumes that that kind of learning implies learning about or aquiring capabilites which have not already been determined or specified by a human. At some level of abstraction, humans _must_ determine that system. It is possible to concieve of a machine that is non-deterministic in that way?

At what point does such a system actually leap beyond what has been specified by us? Does this imply a machine that not only rewrites itsel in softwate, but also remanufactures itself in hardware?

It seems like in any case, use of "server" is generalizable or stable over situations where we have "an entity communicating requests to another entity which is responsible for servicing those requests." The problem here is that the word is invoked so as to distinguish entities at different layers of abstraction (a physical machine, a "platform", a set of supporting libraries and runtimes, a process, a function).