this post was submitted on 14 Apr 2024
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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Is artificial intelligence the great filter that makes advanced technical civilisations rare in the universe?
This professor is arguing we need to regulate AI because we haven't found any space aliens yet and the most conceivably explanation why is that they all wiped themselves out with killer AIs.
And hits some of the greatest hits:
Zero mentions of global warming of course.
I kinda want to think that the author has just been reading some weird ideas. At least he put himself out there and wrote a paper with human sentences! It's all aboard the AI hype train for sure, and constantly makes huge logical leaps, but it somehow doesn't make me feel as skeezy as some of the other stuff on here.
Personally I think a unnoticed black swan event relating climate change is way more likely. 'Whoops turns out that we thought 1.5C wasn't that big a problem but this causes some feedback loop in the oceans killing them all, yes it caused more algae to grow, but these had less nutrition causing the fish to overeat and die, causing the algae to choke themselves out. Dead seas everywhere'.
Sad upvote.
Dont worry, as people are aware this might happen, it isn't technically a black swan event. It is just a risk we are ignoring ;) (im not sure if this is actually a real risk, or that we really are ignoring it, im not a marine biologist).
I feel this makes it an unlikely great filter though. Surely some aliens would be less stupid than humanity?
Or they could be on a planet with far less fossil fuels reserves, so they don't have the opportunity to kill themselves.
Think both 'has the wisdom as a society to prevent unknown unknown side effects from industrialization from wrecking the ecosystem' and 'has almost no access to fossil fuels' could also be pretty effective filters. In the latter case they prob would still be around but they wouldn't spread in the universe so we wouldn't hear from them which I think would satisfy the filter reqs.
"Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the Universe is that none of it has tried to contact us."
Calvin and Hobbes, 8 November 1989
"They say the pollutants we dump in the air are trapping the Sun's heat and it's going to melt the polar ice caps! Sure, you'll be gone when it happens, but I won't! Nice planet you're leaving me!"
Calvin and Hobbes, 23 July 1987
the academic-pressrelease-industrial complex has a lot to fuckin' answer for
I hate that you can't mention the Fermi paradox anymore without someone throwing AI into the mix. There's so much more interesting discussions to have about this than the idea that we're all gonna be paperclipped by some future iteration of spicy autocomplete.
But what's even worse is that those munted dickheads will then claim that they have also found the solution to the Fermi paradox, which is, of course, to give more money to them so they can make their shitty products ~~even worse~~ safer.
Also:
Somehow Clippy 9000 that's clever enough to outsmart the entirety of the human race because it's playing 4D chess with multiverse time travel, is, at the same time, too stupid to come up with any plan that doesn't kill itself in the end, too?
Theres a concentrated effort, it seems, at bringing rationalist stuff into SETI.
Yeah, the fermi paradox really doesn't work here, an AI that was motivated and smart enough to wipe out humanity would be unlikely to just immediately off itself. Most of the doomerism relies on "tile the universe" scenarios, which would be extremely noticeable.
If only the “Dark Forest” hypothesis of human-extraterrestrial interaction would enter the public consciousness any sooner. We’d at least have more interesting ideas than this shit.
NB: I have not watched the 3BP adaptation yet, tho I have heard it is good. I have listened to the first two books as audiobooks and am tickled by Bruno Roubicek’s mildly (three body) problematic accent-work.
Both Lovecraft and Reynolds play with the idea that sentience, when discovered, is hunted down and exterminated by hostile entities. Scalzi’s Old Man’s War universe is somewhere where alien species are in ruthless competition.
All of it is a deflection of the possible and frankly terrifying possibility that we are alone (at least in this galaxy)
The exo-galactic searches haven’t found anything either…
Having a bit of eye trouble, so please ignore any typos. Weird scratching feeling behind the eye, trying not to touch it.
But yeah, isn't that odd that we have not found any? Perhaps it is that if we see them they also see us ba... jesus my eye, fuck. Sorry. But yeah perhaps seeing goes both ways? And perhaps this is why we have not 'found' anything in exo-galactic searches, perhaps it is all a coverup, because we do not want to be seen in return.
I mean, isn't it also odd how important aliens, and the search of extraterrestrial life are in our culture but how few resources we actually put in finding them? Perhaps as soon as we spot something the searchers get shut down, or worse!
(Don't worry my eye is fine, I'm also not being serious, I was doing a bit inspired by the There is no Antimemetics Division SCP series. Now also in short clip form. CW a certain type of lovecraftian horror + memetics. Might not want to read it if you got freaked out by Rokos B, or weird horror in general).
I have never been a huge fan of most of the scp stuff (not that it's bad, it's just not really my thing), but I have reread that series several times at this point, it's so good!
This story series has a lot more focus on people vs a dry procedural things focus as the normal scp stuff has, so not strange that this hits differently.