What WOULD a superintelligence do?

Lucas Working on World Hunger

(And tons of other stuff)

I'm a chopper/slicer

I'm a chipper/shredder/baler hauler

What Else Would a Superintelligence Do?

Here, on page 182 of Lucas 2.0, Shandry, the lead scientist on the development of the Lucas superintelligence seed, is hiking up a slope of huge boulders in and above Carnuel, NM. He is talking to Lucas, or rather Lucas is dumping data almost directly into Shandry's brain about one of the things the S.I. is doing - working on the world hunger crisis. Shandry sees a virtual Lucas avatar accompanying him up the mountainside. Lucas is talking...

FROM LUCAS 2.0

My Seaweed Project.  You like? You see problems? I mean problems other than what I, a mere superintelligence conferring with thousands of humans to get it right, might be getting wrong?”

Shandry picked up his pace, pushing himself closer to his max effort threshold. It was a really steep mile ahead. He let his mind float across the mass of data Lucas had pumped into his brain. He sensed that the operational conversations were already organized into categories. 

Conversations were underway with all - literally all in the world - of the credible people on the sargassum plague in the tropical Atlantic and the Caribbean. Ocean scientists of every stripe were talking to Lucas about their specialty’s view of the megablooms.  Seagoing vessel designers, marine biologists, satellite analysts, NOAA, Eurocean, Jamstech, Ocean U. and ICOIS sargassum specialists were all in one-on-one conversations with Lucas, responding to his ideas about harvesting megatons of the slightly bitter floating weeds and processing them, not for food but to be blended into a new kind of composted mulch for the deteriorated soils of the world to restore their fecundity. Applied in adequate amount, sargassum could reverse the destruction of productive farmland beginning to choke worldwide food production. 

Much breakthrough engineering had been proposed to cope with the sargassum plague that was clogging thousands of miles of Atlantic sea lanes and casting tons of rotting vegetation on beaches from Aruba to Recife on the nose of Brazil, from Casa Blanca to Freetown in Sierra Leone.  Lucas renamed the phenomenon, “the humble weed that will save the world,” always saying it in the rhythms of the Beatitudes. 

“I see fleets of ships churning through the sargassum,” said Lucas, “ripping it out of the ocean with vertical scythes, combing the the masses of living creatures in the subsurface jungles into  freezers for later processing. The leaves, stems and float bladders of the algae will be chipped and shredded on other ships and compressed into dry bales. The harvest paths will be offshore and in sight of land to raise the morale of the beach businesses. How’s that for a summary of your data dump?” 

Lucas stroked his chin where a Smith Brothers beard and mustache appeared. A monocle hung on his chest. He spoke with a Brit accent, “You can bet those Yanks with chemical wrecked topsoil will cheer. Not to mention all the ship and processing gear manufacturers. All the trucks and trains to the midwest. But think, on what I’ve sent you on the other, more direct attack on world hunger, m’lad.”

Shandry looked at the other half of the knowledge he had downloaded.

The more palatable seaweeds, grown in aquaculture farms, required fewer breakthrough technologies, and were an important part of Lucas’s project. Another very large body of simultaneous conversations was going on right now on this project. Over half were explicit planning and feasibility chats with the most qualified and experienced men and women worldwide in the field of aqua-farming. Maps of every seaweed farm on the planet, production numbers and pathology reports for each one. Endless ‘this worked; that didn’t’ anecdotes. Harvesting and processing techniques ranked by time consumed, infrastructure needed, labor availability,  all ordered by efficiencies, costs and risks.  In typical Lucas fashion everything was being done at once. Talk about parallel processing.

     “Consumer adoption?” Shandry whispered through his heavy breathing. He had scanned the download twice, and saw nothing that estimated how quickly people would adopt seaweed dishes into their diets, especially as main courses or primary calorie source. An abundance of highly nutritional food that nobody wanted to eat was unlikely to meet its goal of ending hunger. 

It goes on, but you get the idea. It's the sort of thing a (decent, non-malevolent, likable) superintelligence would do.  Noodle the book ad on Amazon:  https://amzn.to/2ZRzqPo

BTW, here's what's really happening in seaweed in one part of the world:

HEAVE, m'lasses

Great, inspirational BBC article: