[ExI] thinking about the unthinkable

[spike at rainier66.com]

From: Keith Henson <hkeithhenson at gmail.com> 
Subject: Re: [ExI] thinking about the unthinkable

 

 

>>…In my cheerfully misspent childhood, I found a book in the library by Herman Khan, Thinking About the Unthinkable…  The answer to this might explain Fermi’s Paradox.  spike

 

 

>…I sort of doubt the AIs would wipe out humanity unless they went mad. …


Keith

 

 

 

Ja, I am not arguing that it is a likely scenario.  Eliezer once argued it is very likely, but I do not agree with him on that.

 

I am reminded of a popular internet meme:  

 

To those who always draw back the shower curtain to make sure there is no boogey man hiding back there:  suppose one day you snatch back that curtain and there… he… is...    What, exactly, is your plan?

 

At some point we might want to make a plan.  If one is dependent entirely on medications to survive, well, you probably have (at best) as much time as you have medications left.  But to those fortunate enough, such as me, to reach my dotage with no medications, and who have some wilderness skills, and some determination to survive (hey, someone is going to need to coach the next generation on how to make the catastrophe happen again) it might be worth thinking about.

 

Regarding that parenthetical comment: what if… intelligence species are inherently tuned to compete, and they inherently create super AIs which are likewise inherently tuned to compete.  What if SAIs always knock down the species that created it, knocking out itself, and setting the creating civilization back a few generations, but the creating species inherently recovers.  Or rather it comes back, repeating the cycle until it reaches a civilization inherently tolerant of technological stasis, such as sub-Saharan Africa.  There are places in sub Saharan Africa today which scarcely use electricity and would not miss it much if it went away suddenly.  That becomes the new core of recovering humanity.  So we could imagine SAI knocking humanity down until humanity settles into a universal sub Saharan mindset, completely cool with not developing technology at all.

 

If that is a universal pattern, we can explain Fermi’s Paradox.

 

spike

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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