[ExI] More Advanced Extraterrestrials

[Anders Sandberg]

BillK <pharos at gmail.com> , 25/12/2014 6:52 PM:
On Wed, Dec 24, 2014 at 10:57 PM, Robin D Hanson  wrote: 
> I agree they would be far more advanced from us; that was key to my 
> latest comment there. But why should being far more advanced mean 
> that we should "be unable to understand what they will be like"? We 
> don't understand everything, but we do understand some things, so why 
> can't we make use of what we do understand? 
> 

I assume that they will be post-Singularity entities. They won't be 
cowboys with spaceships and laser guns like Star Trek. Their advanced 
tech will be like magic to us. 

I don't believe we will be able to understand post-Singularity aliens. 


Quoting from a paper I am writing:


"The aims of posthumans do not have to be totally alien: humans and chimpanzees do share desires for food, sex, companionship and social status. Posthumans are likely to inherit many commonalities, especially since humans becoming posthuman would aim towards states that appear valuable from a human perspective and hence fulfil human desires to some extent. However, humans pursue the common desires in ways incomprehensible to chimpanzees (such as agriculture, professional work paid in money, social media, and formal politics). Furthermore, these methods create enormous domains of chimp-incomprehensible activity (such as ironworking, accounting, software, and law). Beyond these activities that have a shared ground are human activities like art, sport, religion, philosophy, and science where the link to chimp activities is even more tenuous, yet humans value them deeply. 


Posthumans may similarly have vast domains they value deeply -- to the extent that they may forego things humans regard as paramount in order to achieve them. These domains also would require supporting technologies and praxis that would be opaque to us. Furthermore, they may have changed core aspects of cognition, lifecycles or personal identity in ways that make their aims even more obscure. Nevertheless, they are still bound by the laws of physics: a posthuman civilization will require dissipative energy flows to maintain its structure against entropy, information flows and processing will be bound by lightspeed and quantum mechanical limitations, and so on."


Now, applying this to post-aliens too: we should expect them to have certain traits due to their evolutionary past, and then amplify their ability to achieve them. This leads to secondary interests, most likely along general purpose lines like the convergent instrumental goals we usually worry about in AGI - a post-alien is in many ways just like an AI, something intelligent with possibly weird goals.  


So this picture suggests they will not necessarily be unknowable. However, if we use humanity as a guide a lot of the obvious large-scale activities (cities. agriculture, pit mines, border fences, golf courses) are tangentially or indirectly related to the basic goals, and it seems that historically we are moving further away from the obvious (just a few percent of farmers now, and soon just as few industrial workers - the rest are doing mostly nonobvious services). So my guess is that we would recognize some of the big aims of the post-aliens, but not their means and quite likely miss the big point of their activities. 


However, opaqueness does not mean invisibility (this is where I disagree with Bradbury and Smart, who have argued for a strong convergence towards quietness or invisibility).





Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University
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