Let's Read: Mind Children (1988) by Hans Moravec

This book is half outdated and half amazing. The outdated parts are where he talked about the "latest" advances in AI and robotics, such as the amazing robots that could move across a cluttered room in just 5 hours! (and fails 1/4 of the times). This is why I skipped most of the first 3 chapters.

One great thing I found in the book is a very poetic description of a "Bush Robot" which can be best explained by ponies:

Bush Robot Scootaloo

The idea is simple: a worm is just a giant finger. A pony is a finger with 4 big fingers protruding from the giant finger. A human has 5 middle fingers protruding from every of its 4 big fingers. This process can be extended to multiple levels of fingers, each time increasing the dexterity.

The logical conclusion: Bush Robot hand

Hans Moravec described this robot as if it's magical: It can "see" a movie by touching the films with its end fingers which would be only nanometers in size. It can use one part, using its tiny fingers to structure itself into a diffraction lens, and another part put at the focal plane, to see things far away. It can make copies of itself and manipulate atoms with a power far beyond 3D printing. Its motion would be organic and graceful and wild and surreal, like a dancing fractal magician.

... once there are working bush robots, approaches resembling manual manufacturing methods might undergo a revival. This is because bush robots have "hands" at all scales, from the macroscopic to the microscopic, possibly to the nanoscale... will be able to assemble objects more flexibly, diversely and efficiently than simple layer-by-layer lithography [3D printing]. With sufficiently intelligent controls, bush robots should also be able to make repairs and alterations in existing structures, including biological ones, which lithography simply cannot do.

Hans wrote a whole report on the robot for NASA in 1999: Fractal branching ultra-dexterous robots (Bush robots)

It concluded that Bush Robots are far beyond human ability with current tech, but could be useful eventually.

Fully realized bush robots are so far in advance of available technologies that there is little urgency to pursue their theoretical development now. Doing so is an amusing diversion, and may by chance lead to interesting insights, but is no more likely to lead to practical devices for many decades than other lines of undirected research.

Hans then used the cauliflower robot thing in his description of mind-uploading. The skull is opened and a surgeon puts their cauliflower robot hand on your outermost layer of brain, fully scan its structure and recreate it in a computer, then connect the simulated layer with your brain using the cauliflower hand. This is continued until the hand has completely removed the brain, and pulled away. The body dies and the brain is uploaded.

The mind is a pattern. It thus is independent of how it's made by physical stuff. Further, it's a mathematical pattern that can be modified and changed, so it's even independent of how it's calculated by the precise mathematical details. It's twice-abstracted from the physical world.

Future superintelligences will be able to resurrect us by their extremely advanced archeology. They might do it just out of historical curiosity like how human archeologists study the past just for fun.

Evolution will not stop after superintelligences become common, because accidents keep happening and digital lifeforms arises no matter what. An ecology of superintelligent lifeforms would have their own viruses and parasites and symbiotes stuff. 

One possible solution to the Fermi paradox is the "cosmic virus": there's a viral message flying around in the universe. Civilizations receiving it and decoding it invariably become enticed to construct a machine according to the message, and the machine immediately destroys the civilization and constructs broadcasting machines that broadcast the same message across the universe.

Evolution favors cooperation in peacetime and defection in emergency. Gut bacteria are usually nice, but when they go outside of guts can start multiplying a lot and kill the host. The reason is that if a lot of bacteria suddenly find themselves outside of guts, it probably means the gut is broken and the host is going to die soon. The best thing for the bacteria to do is to multiply a lot and hope that some scavenger would come along and eat the corpse and get some of the bacteria into its guts.

Humans cannot continue to hold their significance and the future of the universe can only be dominated by the superintelligences. They will break out. The sphere of intelligence would grow out at nearly the speed of light, converting all matter it encounters into computronium. As described by Time without End (1979), by Freeman Dyson, it's possible to squeeze an infinite amount of computation in finite time and space. There is thus no limit to how much thinking can happen.

In Appendix 3, consider a space. It can be described in "space space", but after Fourier transformation, it can be described in "frequency space". If waves interact nonlinearly, then frequency space can support interactions between neighboring points, and complexity, even life, can evolve in frequency space just as much as in space space. 

Further, because there are infinitely many kinds of orthogonal function spaces, there can be an infinite number of frequency spaces implemented over the same space space, all independent.