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Comment by monocasa | Hacker News Reader

So far, intelligence on Earth has been zero sum. We've wiped out multiple other intelligent species until we were the only ones.

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I think that was more a result of shared environmental niche more than anything since it happens with non-intelligent species as well. Predators fight over same prey niche even in the same species. Stable multipredator shared prey arrangements have a clear power differential - the stronger one can chase the weaker ones away from kills and if they are slow enough that may be their main strategy.

If there were say merpeople from a similar time table it would take a long time for conflicts to start because they have a totally different environmental niche.

Anyway early bands of hominids were nomadic by necessity due to localized depletion of food supplies. Given that scarcity it is no wonder that they would come into conflict and managed to drive megafauna to extinction. And their numbers weren't exactly high - humanity bears genetic scars of near extinction.

Said scarcity is such a thing of the past that we have food distribution problems instead of production ones.

Granted there is also a long history of zero sum thinking holding humanity back.

Wouldn't intelligences engineered to be a component of our society, by definition, be sharing an environmental niche with us. Going back to your merpeople analogy, we wouldn't put in the effort to build AI, just to drop them in the ocean and have them live their lives separately from us and providing no use to us unless they become so economical that they're just literally everywhere on Earth.

Edit: and going back to you merpeople example, the onset of humans represents a mass extinction level event for the closest thing to merpeople: ceteceans. http://www.iucn-csg.org/index.php/status-of-the-worlds-cetac...

We didn't do that because we're intelligent. We did that because we're assholes.

Bacteria could wipe us out tomorrow given the right circumstances. They can be assholes too.

> They can be assholes too.

Not really; they don't have any cognition. They're just little machines. They're no more of an asshole than a toaster or a clothespin.

But isn't an asshole just a complex arrangement of proverbial toasters and clothespins?

Those barefoot lego landmines are assholes.

Depends on if you define asshole as intentions or results. Destroying a good thing for everyone for short term gain is classic asshole but of course they lack the agency.

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