[ExI] Silence in the sky-but why?

[Anders Sandberg]

On 2013-08-27 15:32, spike wrote:
> Of all the observed scientific anomalies that I know of, the misnamed 
> Fermi paradox is absolutely the most vexing. The more we study that 
> question, the more clear it is that there is something fundamentally 
> wrong with our models of everything we think we know about 
> intelligence, evolution, space travel, everything.

Yes. You can guess why it is a favourite around the FHI office. It 
annoys us too.

>   This view of the evolution of intelligence as a temporary random 
> excursion from the boring mean, a spike rather than an S curve to a 
> new and higher plateau, goes against everything I have always believed 
> and hoped for, but it is the only way I have been able to explain 
> Fermi's paradox. This realization is in some ways worse than when my 
> own fundamentalist religious notions crumbled to dust beneath my feet. 
> I do hope someone can talk me out of this grim conclusion.

Well, we might be lucky and life is amazingly unlikely. A more worrying 
possibility is strong convergence: all civs somehow become quiet and do 
not litter the universe; as I have argued this is deeply problematic - 
why are there no defectors? The possibility of the earliest big 
expanders just setting up some rules implementing this, with police 
nanoprobes in every system, is downright paranoid but seems much more 
consistent - and might actually be pretty benign, if a tad too close to 
a religious view (God as a script set by ancient aliens running on a 
distributed police replicator system...) The simulation argument might 
be the really nice one: we are living inside the posthumans' simulation, 
and they just left out aliens.

When being simulated or subject to alien police devices are the nice 
options, then things are weird.


-- 
Dr Anders Sandberg
Future of Humanity Institute
Oxford Martin School
Oxford University