>When our uncertainty is properly accounted for in the model,
we find a substantial a priori chance that there is no other
intelligent life in our observable universe
:(
:(
> Conclusion 2: the great filter is likely in the past
Is there an article to go with these slides? I'm somewhat competent with probability theory and I found it hard to follow with all the unmarked graphs and unexplained parameters.
If on the other hand the early terms are much lower than expected, as this PDF is discussing, then the sum total of them could be considered the "Great Filter" and we could be past it. It's fine to just lump them together from our point of view, since at the moment we don't have the data to figure out which gate is "really" the determinative one.
Wandering down my own thoughts here: The Copernican Principle, or perhaps better termed in modern parlance the Copernican Heuristic, that we are nothing particularly special, has had a good run. But it is just a heuristic, and one whose adherence has arguably been driven more by a science v. religion feud than logic or data, and whose underlying logic in the past 50ish years has metastasized into "Some religious people I don't like think Man is unique, they're wrong about everything, therefore Man is not unique in any way." But lately the Copernican Heuristic has been showing a lot of strain. Our solar system may not be unique, but it is increasingly looking like it may indeed be unusual, for instance. The Rare Earth arguments have never gone away and I think a lot of the dismissal of that idea has also come from "Religious people like the idea of the Rare Earth and some of them are arguing for it, religious people are wrong about everything, therefore Earth is not rare." [1], because scientifically they look as good as anything else on the subject (namely "those arguments seem to fit our lack of data as well as anything else", which is a pretty weak endorsement). And per the PDF under discussion, a lot of the universe really starts to make more sense when you start to seriously consider the possibility that, yes, we may in fact be very unusual, if not perhaps truly unique.
[1]: Those are not the only arguments here, nor are they the best; I'm just saying that it is my subjective sense that the debate over the past few decades has often been very skewed by the underlying presence of this argument, even when not necessarily spoken. It is my perception that this debate has often been had under unspoken ground rules where all the discussion must occur in such a way as to ensure that the religious people are unable to point to anything as evidence for their side. It... doesn't make for the best conditions to do science under.
The number of civilizations, N, is assumed to be equal to the mathematical product of
- the average rate of star formation, R∗, in our galaxy,
- the fraction of formed stars, *fp*, that have planets,
- for stars that have planets, the average number of planets *ne* that can potentially support life,
- the fraction of those planets, *fl*, that actually develop life,
- the fraction of planets bearing life on which intelligent, civilized life, *fi*, has developed,
- the fraction of these civilizations that have developed communications, *fc*, i.e., technologies that release detectable signs into space, and
- the length of time, *L*, over which such civilizations release detectable signals.
> Anders Sandberg, Stuart Armstrong, and their co-author Milan Cirkovic published a paper outlining a potential strategy for advanced civilizations to postpone computation until the universe is much colder, and thereby producing up to a 10^30 multiplier of achievable computation. This might explain the Fermi paradox, although a future paper from FHI suggests there may be no paradox to explain.
Now lumpers v splitters aside there are plenty of tool using, problem solving, communicating species on the planet right now. And they cover the spread too: Octopuses, apes, birds; ants individually are of course dumb as a brick but colonies have actually invented agriculture.
Yeah, ants probably will never make it into space and birds lack fine dexterity to build a rocket ship even if there is a parrot Newton/Ramanajun but that doesn't mean we won't find something to have a conversation with if we can go to them.
fi = the fraction of planets with life that actually go on to develop intelligent life (civilizations)
fc = the fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that releases detectable signs of their existence into spaceThen humanity has a long way to go before proving its intelligence.
Which is the core of Fermi paradox, and therefore it still stands.
What would you say if someone came along and said, “Hey, we want to genetically engineer mentally retarded human infants! For reasons of scientific progress we need infants with certain cognitive and emotional deficits in order to study their postnatal psychological development - we urgently need some funding for this important and innovative kind of research!“ You would certainly think this was not only an absurd and appalling but also a dangerous idea. It would hopefully not pass any ethics committee in the democratic world. However, what today’s ethics committees don’t see is how the first machines satisfying a minimally sufficient set of constraints for conscious experience could be just like such mentally retarded infants. They would suffer from all kinds of functional and representational deficits too. But they would now also subjectively experience those deficits. In addition, they would have no political lobby - no representatives in any ethics committee.
If they had a transparent world-model embedded in a virtual window of presence, then a reality would appear to them. They would be minimally conscious. If, as advanced robots, they even had a stable bodily self-model, then they could feel sensory pain as their own pain, including all the consequences resulting from bad human engineering. But particularly if their postbiotic PSM (phenomenal self-model) were actually anchored in biological hardware, things might be much worse. If they had an emotional self-model, then they could truly suffer - possibly even in degrees of intensity or qualitative richness that we as their creators cannot imagine, because it is entirely alien to us. If, in addition, they possessed a cognitive self-model, they could potentially not only conceive of their bizarre situation but also intellectually suffer from the fact that they never had anything like the “dignity” so important to their creators. They might be able to consciously represent the obvious fact that they are only second-rate subjects, used as exchangeable experimental tools by some other type of self-modeling system, which obviously doesn’t know what it is doing and which must have lost control of its own actions long ago. Can you imagine what it would be like to be such a mentally retarded phenomenal clone of the first generation? Alternatively, can you imagine what it would be like to “come to” as a more advanced artificial subject, only to discover that, although possessing a distinct sense of self, you are just a commodity, a scientific tool never created and certainly not to be treated as an end in itself?
If that argument is taken seriously then it should already be starting to apply to things like the Google spam filter, but once you take it out of the space of hypothetical possibilities like that and apply it to real code it becomes obviously absurd. There is less than no reason to believe that the only possible artificial intelligence will be simply humans that live in machines and have all their needs and desires, and even such AIs that are nascent in the world today already have grotesquely different architectures than that, with little reason to believe making our spam filters or car navigation systems "more human" in the existential sense would even remotely improve them. Why would my car's navigation system even need to be able to represent "a sadness that I'm just a car navigational system instead of a Real Boy", let alone actually manifest it?
By far the greater risk in that world is the economy/universe optimizing out everything that makes humans human until the entire universe is simply a highly efficient philosophical zombie, rather than the risk that every last subsystem of everything in the world is secretly going to be a human-class homunculus trapped in some boring task.
This, to me, is a greater risk than "evil AI." If humanity does cease to exist, it will be a slow, painless, barely observable extinction (perhaps even paraded as ascension) as we integrate with and are then replaced by the technology we've created.
I don't think this is entirely realistic, just because there's an anthropocentric bias in me that believes that humans are wonderfully useful and robust self-replicating machines, and that economically we're (1) fairly energy efficient and (2) valuable to "throw at problems" we don't want to mass produce specific silicon-based solutions to.
But I did want to thank you for pointing this out. I do think it's wonderfully naive we often ascribe human characteristics and fallacies to hypothetical general AI that we experiment with or build, as though distinctly human consciousness is somehow the epitome of achievement. It's not even in our best interest, economically or ethically, to strive for that.
Argument about conscious Google spam is quite unfair and unwarranted. In fact, if you actually consider what Metzinger has to say about necessary conditions for consciousness (for example in "Being No One" or "The Ego Tunnel"), then obviously Google spam is nothing like that.
Either way it seems to me that it may be better to err on the side of not making conscious AI in the first place rather than unintentionally making one with capacity to suffer. Especially that it may be non-obvious that it has capacity to experience pain. For example, we have already made this mistake by using curare alone as an anesthetic - presuming that a lack of automatic pain response, and ability to communicate feeling of pain means that one doesn't feel pain. That was a considerable misjudgment.