[ExI] Fermi Paradox and Transcension

[Anders Sandberg]

On 05/09/2012 13:16, BillK wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 5, 2012 at 11:38 AM, Anders Sandberg wrote:
>> While I hope this is possible and maybe true, I think there is a deep
>> problem with the hypothesis: it assumes a very strong convergence to this
>> lifestyle. It must be so good that no alien Amish or explorers get left
>> behind to make the universe different. Can you imagine any cultural or
>> technological innovation that would suck in 100% of humans?
> Well, of course we are not talking about clever monkeys leaping into
> black holes.  :)
>
> It will be the future descendents of humanity after 500 or a thousand
> years of transhumanism have left animal bodies behind long ago. As
> humanity evolves into computronium with all that that implies not many
> will resist the move to a different substrate. Perhaps some will, at
> first, to succumb later. (Resistance is futile!).

Yes, but unless the rate of succumbing is higher than the rate of 
spreading, there will be more and more people living outside over time. 
In addition, there is a form of cultural evolution going on: people who 
are strongly averse to moving in will have more outside "offspring" 
(copies, daughter colonies, whatever) than those who are more OK with 
moving in (they move in and have no offspring). Over time you will get 
more and more resistant people, who are unlikely to want to join. It 
only takes one such resistant group that decides to colonize the 
universe, and it will be colonized.

The same is true for all other civilisations. For the transcension 
hypothesis to work it needs to assume that the attractiveness of 
computronium is enormous for *all* alien types, no matter how weird. And 
this attractiveness is so big that no individual values or goals could 
ever resist it over time. That seems to be a pretty amazing assumption.

Is there *anything* we know of that would be such a motivator to present 
humans? Something so good that nobody can resist it even when they have 
religious, philosophical or ideosyncratic reasons to not go for it? 
People are obviously resisting both sex, chocolate, religion, world of 
warcraft, drugs and pursuing individual happiness already.

-- 
Anders Sandberg,
Future of Humanity Institute
Oxford Martin School
Faculty of Philosophy
Oxford University