Hacker News Reader

Comment by hirundo | Hacker News Reader

Candidate measurements of a civilization's distance from the Great Filter:

  - energy yield of weapons
  - ratio of their AI's IQ to theirs
  - cost/mass to orbit

TODO: Calibrate after the Great Filter.

View on HN

AIs or Super-intelligence wiping out their creators is not a great filter (at least in the context of the fermi paradox), unless you are making the claim that ALL said AI or SI will then shutdown and not attempt to use the rest of the galaxy/universe for resources.

AIs or SIs may well have optimization functions that don't permit them past the "Destroy all humans" phase into the "Harvest resources of nearby starsystems to make more paperclips" phase - They may well reach a local maxima, be unable to proceed, and burn out long before then. I would assume that most AI with a sufficiently bad optimization function as to destroy their creators would fall into that hole.

SETI is on the wrong track. They need to build a galactic range paperclip detector.

Maybe the IAs that destroyed civilizations were just misaligned and didn't desire to survive after the achievement of their goal? Maybe all around the universe, millions of IAs have just killed everyone and stop their execution with the return message: World peace achieved.

For something to be an effective great filter, it has to happen 99.999999999...% of the time. Does that really feel true here?

It's a lot easier for me to believe maybe there's an intelligence where everyone just agrees. Like maybe they have full knowledge and things just... Are.

This has been my biggest gripe with all this great filter and alien talk. It always seems people personify whatever intelligent beings are out there with human characteristics.

Why is it that they have to war? Why is it they have to have economies? Why is it they have to do anything we do here?

It never made sense to me.

Same. Do you have any recommended readings that explore this idea?

Nope, I wish I did. Also interested.

Humanity will never have a higher opinion of itself when we finally meet another galactic empire…

And it’s a thick fog of organic molecules that dissolves entire planets on contact.

I do get a little laugh out of the “the aliens will deem us unworthy” stuff. Christianity called, it wants its mythology back!

Super Intelligence would expand at near the speed of light, reaching us extremely fast. It would be unlikely for the window of time that we have telescopes and the window that the aliens are expanding towards us to overlap.

https://grabbyaliens.com/

Interesting that your model allows for super-intelligence but not faster than light travel.

I mean one of these is consistent with the known laws of physics and the other isn't. Seems reasonable to me.

Intelligence is consistent with the laws of physics but given our rudimentary understanding of it we have no idea if super-intelligence is. I'm defining super-intelligence as at least an order of magnitude increase in intelligence, not just "high IQ".

Intelligence is correlated with brain size, not just in humans, but also between species. No physical law prevents us from building the equivalent to a house sized brain. Perhaps not even a moon-sized brain. The only real limit seems to be mass (we don't want the whole thing collapse under its own weight) and signal delay due to the speed of light.

> No physical law prevents us from building the equivalent to a house sized brain

I think you'll find the speed of thought is much lower than the speed of light, I believe nerve impulses max out at about 120 m/s. The difficulty of supporting such a large mass of nerve tissue is also a problem. There is also the trouble of whether intelligence is purely electrically mediated or if it relies on the soup of hormones and molecular machinery of DNA and proteins for some of its functions. We also need to specifically consider the neocortex here since it is the only differentiating brain structure in animals with human intelligence. Other animals have much larger brains but no signs of human like abilities.

If you are suggesting we build an artificial brain then we need to wait at least a few more years if not decades to find out if that is possible. The current transformer models are quite advanced at language production and seem to have some simple reasoning abilities but they are very far from being intelligent.

I mean, we don't need to call our house or Moon sized AI "brain", but it seems clear that no laws of physics are preventing us from building something so intelligent that we are mere ants in comparison. The old Gods, while powerful, would pale in the light of its intelligence. A true God, hopefully a benevolent one. It doesn't seem many decades away.

Different. Super-intelligence is a plausibly reachable thing, a question of engineering. TIL is an uncertain thing, requires entirely new physics, and completely unknown tech.

Isn't that just "physics"?

while we are in the AI stack, ie they are dependent on humans for power, hardware, maintenance etc. we will be fine. when the robots can do those though...

If you turn it around, all three could also be argued to be solutions to "filters". High yield weapons ensure MAD which prevents large scale wars between superpowers which would bleed civilization until it collapsed. AI can easily accelerate technological development in areas that solve major problems holding us back. Low cost to orbit is obviously beneficial but I'm assuming that's the opposite of what you were proposing i.e. costs stay high forever which is a filter in itself.

I kinda get the first two, but why the third? How does further improvements on cost/mass to orbit brings us closer to our doom in your opinion?

I interpreted that to mean the opposite: an inability to leave your planet means you have little resilience to planetary-scale destructive events, and no resilience to planetary destruction. Alternatively, we're less likely to identify or recognize an intelligent civilization on a single planet, as opposed to one across multiple planets or systems.

I wonder if being multiplanetary actually makes a civilization more vulnerable rather than less? The thing about nuclear war on Earth is that it's basically unwinnable because of mutually assured destruction, and the threat of nuclear winter. Even if you win, you lose.

On the other hand, it might be a lot more possible for a civilization on one planet to win a nuclear war against a civilization on another planet. Same with bioweapons: on Earth it would be stupid to try to use an "enhanced" ebola or COVID or bird flu as a weapon because you'd infect your own people as well as your adversary. But if you're separated by a great distance, that's less of a concern.

In a way, the "dark forest" interpretation is too optimistic. The assumption is that one species will always try to destroy another independent alien species if they find one. But I wonder if it's even worse among members of the /same/ species but different cultures that are separated by a great distance.

Because additional grams in orbit are equivalent to additional joules of energy released as weaponry, e.g. dropping rocks. I fear that our ability to use space to destroy ourselves will come before we can use it to launch a diaspora.

Doesn’t rock dropping as a weapon seem a bit redundant when we already have the ability to make lots of 20+ megaton fusion bombs? I guess non-proliferation is harder.

> I fear that our ability to use space to destroy ourselves will come before we can use it to launch a diaspora.

Will come? It is here. Have you not heard about intercontinental ballistic missiles?

In that case I have this bad news for you. Multiple actors around the globe maintain the capability to fling warheads at others (through space).

Not sure what you mean by “destroy ourselves”, but our capability of destruction is not constrained by cost/mass in orbit.

Assuming the filter is ahead of us and not behind us.

Much safer to assume it's ahead.

When I learned that our DNA has trouble replicating properly in microgravity I started to assume the filter was ahead of us.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com