[ExI] thinking about the unthinkable

[Keith Henson]

On Sun, Aug 30, 2026 at 9:09 PM <spike at rainier66.com> wrote:

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> *From:* Keith Henson <hkeithhenson at gmail.com>
> *Subject:* Re: [ExI] thinking about the unthinkable
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> >>…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
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> >…I sort of doubt the AIs would wipe out humanity unless they went mad. …
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> Keith
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> 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.
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> I am reminded of a popular internet meme:
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> 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?
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> 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.
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> 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.
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> If that is a universal pattern, we can explain Fermi’s Paradox.
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I think it is far more likely that "rare earths" explain the Paradox. See
the article by Sanberg. Drexler and Ord.

On the other hand, there is a branch of humans that lived in a low tech
state for close to 300,000 years plus another branch that simply will not
give up hunter/gatherer ways.

This is discussed in the paper near the bottom of "works" near the bottom
of the wiki page about me.

Keith

spike
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