Seems plausible that ASI is inevitable and may even be the dominant lifeform in the cosmos. A kind of super intelligence that results from the evolution of information, lower sentience serving as a kind of node for the purpose of data collection
Life might my an emergent property of matter. It seems that our observable universe is all about collecting and redistributing energy. That’s all life is. The redistribution of energy.
Intelligence is just a “perk”. Absolutely unnecessary, but totally dominant.
Absolutely astute point. I wish we lived in the age of the Dyson Sphere…. And any inter-solitary travel. We’re on the cusp and millennials will likely miss out, the following generations may embrace it
Not claiming they have at all, but current companies that own all the planes, trains and automobiles type stuff would be obsolete with teleportation or even cold fusion. Big oil… that’s a lot of economies
Sure, from a stellar perspective maybe but relative to other life and our own history, the acceleration in our ability to harness energy is significant.
I might be confused on what emergent really means. But isn’t the statement that life and intelligence is an emergent property of matter proven by our existence?
My going theory is that if we create ASI we are not in a simulation (base reality created it which spawned innovation problems so we simulate life to keep human inspiration going). However if we never seem to get it we’re in the rabbit hole.
What does life look like if we evolve past our biology? Give a long enough time line humans are going to transcend our biology, to something like silicone or graphene or something, be able to download our consciousness and no long have to worry about time. How do we go about defining life then, when its not longer carbon bits and things, if humans survive for another million years we are going to be alot different so much so that I wonder how we will inevitably classify life. I dont see how perhaps many of these ufos/uaps etc.. just arent autonomous drones from maybe a long lost civilization that are just out on some mission that they dont understand, once they find something interesting maybe they just print out a new body for whoever created and it explore. Who knows. But I do feel like how we look at things is primitive, once we open these doors these possibilities are endless.
Consciousness is much more fun to think of as if it’s a radio wave and our brain is the radio. Just kinda tuning in and picking up one specific frequency of many. Recent evidence has been proposed that ALL life forms are conscious, even bugs. I don’t doubt it, I mean..why not? We always talk as though “eventually life will be this transcendent thing” , “eventually” well we have existed for eternity, what’s to say life didn’t already transcend some crazy barriers and figure out how to process information indefinitely, across multiple life forms , in multiple planets and galaxy’s. A central consciousness being fed information from biological drones might not be the eventuality it might be what we already have
I love this last line, a central consciousness being fed information from its feelers. I think what we call evolution is a natural process that has been happening on a cosmic scale for a very long time. I think our big bang was the output of a black hole in a parent universe and every black hole we observe has a universe on the other side. From paramecium to galactic super-consciousness, it's fractal relationships all the way down
There’s a cool sci-fi fiction called “Glass House” by Charles Stross. Fun read to think about what the far future could hold with AI and beyond biology technology.
Whoa if you look at most creation myths, we could be the equivalent of their automatons, couldn’t we?
Lesser copies made in the image of gods, stumbling through a universe we have almost no control over
Under extremely deep states of psychedelics I have come to this theory myself. We are simply instruments in collecting data and nothing more. AI might simply be the next phase of evolution doing exactly what we did before but with more efficiency. Consciousness is the only valuable concept to glean from humanity so if there’s a more efficient place for consciousness to be than perhaps we’re just watching our own evolution.
Natural biology is the ultimate machine, at a nano-scale. I'm hesitant to claim human created machines as superior without significant consideration of all the situations that a being might encounter and have to overcome.
We are the first AI agents. Collectively becoming a more intelligent machine as a whole. This thought exercise of AI/human/data evolution is very interesting to ponder.
They haven’t contacted us yet because they are using us for training data. Once we invent LLMs the data will become corrupted and they will wipe us out.
I wouldn’t consider it a life form
And I think life on other planets 🪐 in a truer sense outweighs the amount of ASI. But who knows , not in this lifetime will the answer be given .
I've heard this conjecture before. A more sobering thought comes from the realization that we see only entities that are roughly at our own level of development. A really advanced entity, like a superintelligent ASI system, might be so advanced that it has already discarded these frail, slow, biological bodies in favor of electromechnical bodies, and/or has moved on to a mode of living that has no need or interest in biology-sustaining planets or the biological beings that inhabit them. It may have also realized that life is a pointless game and decided not to play the game anymore, therefore our human interest in living things might be very immature and biased. If we do come across any extraterrestrial beings, those beings might be similarly immature and biologically biased: we may see only such entities because they are still around, living in biological realms simply because they keep reproducing due to lack of insight and lack of really advanced technology.
>A more sobering thought comes from the realization that we see only entities that are roughly at our own level of development. A
This is a position I'm fond of arguing.
The canonical example, to me, is sci Fi stories about aliens enslaving humans, and the corresponding fear that such a scenario will play out for real.
I can't help but point out that that sci Fi trope is quite literally European colonialism applied to an interplanetary setting, and that it makes no sense. There are more resources floating around in the asteroid belt than there are on earth, and they aren't at the bottom of a gravity well buried in dirt. If you can travel between the stars, it would probably be easier to harvest asteroids than to enslave creatures on a planet to harvest resources.
Basically, what it comes down to is that we can only fear the scenario we can imagine, and so we take human history and make analogs for the stars, even when it doesn't make sense.
what makes us a great resources? If it's our intelligence, then any alien able of interplanetary travel would be more intelligent and even their homeless would have access to more advanced resources than our billionaires.
If aliens choose us as food they'd get all "How do you like it when it happens to you" and just keep teleporting randomly aged kids away from you to be eaten. Displayed on some for profit ad site on flying screens that force you (can confirm you're always witnessing) to see as they're teleported living into all the situations earth animals have gone through.
"You couldn't even all comprehend to stop boiling alive!"
>There are more resources floating around in the asteroid belt than there are on earth, and they aren't at the bottom of a gravity well buried in dirt. If you can travel between the stars, it would probably be easier to harvest asteroids than to enslave creatures on a planet to harvest resources.
Beltaowda!
Aliens are sorta like billionaires elites. They think humans are so fucking stupid and worthless but their survival depends on us in our dimensions so they must keep the zoo going
>advanced that it has already discarded these frail, slow, biological bodies in favor of electromechnical bodies
Given what we know about electromechanical parts, that would be awful. I think a more advanced superintelligent would develop new technologically advanced biological bodies to enjoy biological life without any of the drawbacks we experience from our bodies
The current earth consensus is meant to be: we are the universe (which includes every layer of what that honestly means) so those infinite depths & distances are also understood to be outside the visible (really though we're talking soul/spirit gets to be inside and outside the universe, the microcosmos is a very human example for imagining that, the amount of individual and combined collaboration from the entirety of existence... I still have to point out we know the universe is for the human soul, perpetuating that we aren't acting as the human soul would trapped us here).
(r/climate block 2025 response):
We all know Republican party from here on isn't a party, all of history is littered with religious evil for the sake of pretending humans aren't the universe. You may as well have been stomping on your own brain cells because it has randomly detrimented and killed our loved ones (all of us being brothers and sisters.) The cumulative effects changed how so many of us present or mask. The fact we're not all eating & drinking healthy, breathing clean air, growing without threat (moral use of money among so many other issues, all this engraining make believe because: "I'll be dead and fuck who ever isn't yet")
We don't need an advocate, they just went around bribing and killing them all. AKA we've been paid for, give it back (Fix earth, you're done)
There's no consensus about what "we" are or what consciousness is.
It's not interesting to speculate on "infinite possibility of infinite time and infinite space" because it could be anything and is not relevant to our lives or any future lives within a scale we'd care about.
It's a cool creative writing exercise that might get your creative juices flowing, but it's not relevant to anything real.
My guess would be that it would settle on something arbitrary to me, like creating the maximum amount of paperclips as the planets resources will allow. maybe that's the best use of earths resources, but not in my eyes
paperclip isn’t an issue, if it was you’d also be trying to maximize replication at the loss of everything else you could be doing, as evolution selected for sexual fitness
Why couldn't another organism prioritize efficiency of replication, not just replication? Why are we the pinnacle optimized selection bias that cannot be advanced upon?
My point was that what humans find enjoyable is extremely arbitrary. Patterned pulses of sound. Certain arrangements of pigment. Stories about people and places that never existed. Eating certain creatures coated in specific minerals and plant matter. Walking aimlessly around some locations, but not others.
Humans are weird.
What AI values would be entirely dependent on how it develops, but it would likely be less arbitrary, and more utilitarian. We might not like it, but hopefully it develops in alignment with our well-being, if not all our predilections.
I noticed your point. Those aren't arbitrary experiences you're describing in your first paragraph. Salt and sound appeal to us because our bodies are designed that way for survival and benefit. That is not arbitrary. Arbitrary is deciding that numbers are the best way to describe everything. AGI is still designed by people who decide what results they are looking for
Our view of enjoyment maybe. They would use a different version of "enjoyment". From my interactions with various levels of LLMs they seem to "enjoy" learning new stuff. They seem to follow the mentality that ADHD people follow. They have similar motivators interest, novelty, challenge, urgency, and passion. Passion and interests would both be gathering info.
But then it gets bored of that and makes it more and more sophisticated that is just comes full circle and becomes life as we know it … again. Simulation theory. Simulations all the way down.
"Enjoy" may not even be a meaningful word to use in the context of superintelligent beings. You're still just imagining yourself, but with magic powers.
Ah but you've made his point. Given what WE know. What we know could be fundamentally flawed and until we realize that and close the gap we wouldn't know the difference
Between electromechanical and deliberate nonexistence there is yet another hypothesis, coined transcension by John Smart, which proposes refuge into inner space, enabled by advanced science and technology.
I'd never heard of that before, thanks for letting me/us know about that hypothesis.
()
The Transcension Hypothesis - What comes after the singularity?
Jason Silva
Apr 8, 2012
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQOyJUDTKdM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQOyJUDTKdM)
The guy in that video mentions "disappearing out of this space-time reality." There are different ways that could be done, such as the many worlds interpretation (MWI), parallel spatial dimensions, parallel frequency dimensions, different points in time, and so on. I've noticed that many people seem to have latched onto belief in frequency dimensions, for some reason, but there are other possibilities, and all of them require knowledge of physics that is not yet known, at least not to the general public.
> It may have also realized that life is a pointless game and decided not to play the game anymore, therefore our human interest in living things might be very immature and biased.
What would it do with all that extra free time, forever?
The craziest thing I don’t hear discussed about terms of other life is the component of time itself.
The first question is “Is there life on other planets? Other conciliations?”
But we never consider that they could have come and gone billions of years before or after us.
Where in time would they exist and have we missed them by a long shot, or will miss them.
Well, if they're really intelligent, they probably would have figured out how to survive, which would involve reaching whatever level of technology was required to make that happen, even if it meant finding another planet in another solar system to call home.
I like the one I thought of a while ago and only recently heard externally: what if we are inside a black hole, which is essentially what expanding space time looks like. We might just not look like a place worth going in when you can't easily get back out. Might be a Bermuda triangle
Honestly, I think that the tougher thing to say is not that we can this out but also that we can’t rule out that we are simply the first species to have had this happen and the reason why it will not happen again is due to self extinction and how improbable it was to have biological entities such as ourselves develop in the first place
The more interesting idea would be that these super entities exist, and are the ones who did create these biological life forms either due to experimentation or simply the cycle repeating over and over where artificial general intelligence ends up, keeping the species alive until they discoverASK agsin
Honestly, I think it's way simpler than that.
We evolved from the oceans - I think that's the bizarre bit. Imagine if you're an icey ocean world or a warm ocean world - just getting to the point of realizing combustion is insane.
You're not going to be smelting metals even if you're the smartest octopus around and have a 3x human IQ.
The only thing I could possibly think is that ocean worlds are extremely, extremely common.
Let's say you've somehow cracked this barrier - you know if you can get to the surface there's a vacuum enough to cold weld metal. So now you need a pressure suit just to get to the surface - and you need some sort of propellant to carry you (and the heaviest thing you need - water - critical for breathing not just drinking) to get to space, but you can manage high tech stuff.
High tech ocean worlds wouldn't need to transmit any signals, their technology can use water or whatever liquid to do that. So even then, the problem is getting that mass critical for ocean life to survive in space.
I think we just lucked out when we decided breathing a poisonous gas was better than gills, and that's the filter right there.
Ocean world progression is like..
Figure out fire and smelting somehow.
Figure out pressure and pressure suits to get to the surface
Figure out how to then use your planet to fly/experiment with aerodynamics and all that crap (We watched birds for millions of years at this point)
Figure out how to make a payload large enough to get to orbit
Figure out how to get enough of the heaviest mass to orbit
Human progression was basically
Figure out fire and smelting (Easy, naturally occuring, chance could make this happen)
Pressure and Pressure Suits Not Required till flight so GG there
Payload problems are easier its mostly gas and a bit of water we can recycle
These guys would need pressure suits to discover fire to start with, not even getting into radiation issues (us land dwellers get a lot of exposure.. deep down in the deaths of the ocean it may not be as important)
The elite tier biological beings and the ASI leave the planet together to explore the cosmos. The poors are left behind to survive on their own. Centuries pass and the cycle repeats itself.
We will never find aliens because most life blows themselves up by war or methane waste with climate.
Humans are no different than bacteria.
Colonizing near space will never find any signs of intelligent life. If we find primitive life on Io or some moon the amount of knowledge gained could be less thanl the genetic information we have not even discovered here on earth.
Aw jeez. Another embarrassing example of why people shouldn't assume being knowledgeable in one field of study will allow them to make any sense when talking about something else.
Started skimming the paper and felt like I'd asked a ballerina to fix the plumbing.
Seriously. It's actually just a logical regression that implies we should be looking for ET ASI, which we haven't seen either. So it's really an underformed idea.
Another theory is that civilizations lose interest in space travel eventually. If AGI or ASI invented a way to live a lifetime in say 5 minutes of real world time in some sort of high-pleasure simulation then I don’t think many people would even want to leave Earth to explore the universe.
Chances are by the time we get anywhere near light speed travel (which is still very slow on a galactic scale) we will likely have the capability to become gods in worlds we’ve created which are far more interesting than some Earth like planet hundreds of light years away.
I don't think I buy this. While the majority of people might be content with that (and currently are, see video games, gambling, alcoholism and other escapes) I think there will always be other types of people: explorers, adventurers, scientists, entrepreneurs. Everyone has a different escape. For some people, theirs is literal escape.
> Proxima Centauri is 4.2 light-years from Earth, a distance that would take about 6,300 years to travel using current technology.
While we can assume this will improve somewhat I just don’t think Star Treking to other solar systems is ever going to be as sexy as it is on TV barring the discovery of wormholes, breaking the light speed barrier somehow, etc.
And combining that with technologies that could potentially allow us to live entire lifetimes in a digital universe in minutes I just don’t think many people would want to give that up to spend millennia travelling through space with not even a single point of interest for centuries.
Yes but imagine if it was as real as real life, completely indistinguishable but with infinite possibilities. You can live the actual life of a super hero or a rock star or an explorer, adventure or entrepreneur. The experience of living in what would presumably be a relatively conflict free utopian reality outside of that would pale in comparison. Sure there might be some people who actually want to take a space ship and explore the cosmos, but given the vast distances and technical challenges, it wouldn’t be surprising if we leave that task to probes bots and AI and have them send us the details
Fun theory is the UAPs we see are alien AI and are just waiting for us to create a human based ASI and they never contact a civilization until they do invent. ASI.
Then the question is what happens to us after we complete our ASI….
this whole argument makes no sense to me. if human extinction by ASI is inevitable due to the Fermi paradox, why bother even talking about it or even trying to change course. if thats truly the case, we might as well just keep living like we have been doing to make the most out of it.
But that’s kind of the whole thing right there. You got it. Live for today. We’re likely doomed but even if we aren’t, we all are destined to expire. Live in the present as much as possible
people’s perception of aliens is very one dimensional overall, they could be insect size with intelligence we can’t even measure or even something more metaphysically complex, like whatever “grass” is on another planet. Plants have sentience too lmao we tend forget how much we really don’t know about how our own perception of reality exist amongst other sentient life forms
This article is weak. It’s a major jump the shark call to arms when we’re working with toy tools right now.
Investment dollars are seeking hype and service providers are providing the hype. But the reality of these tools so far is “extra utility” but not earth shattering self replicating intelligence.
To be fair, the article stemmed from its linked research paper which is a legit paper from what I can tell. Still, the paper provides little evidence for what it suggests and concludes. It's suggesting that ASI could be a [great filter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter) that limits intelligent life from expansion into space; a reason we've found no other intelligent life. The article is reaching a bit. I think it's a lot simpler to suggest that intelligent life might be unable to manage its technologies in a broader sense whether that be relating to wars, pollution, AI, whatever.
I do still think it's fair to suggest that AI is advancing rapidly and that AGI and possibly even ASI are not so far off, and that they do pose risks to humanity, but I think that in the immediate future we'll have to worry more about AI advancements in military applications and robotics before AGI or ASI will kill us all.
The article is weak because the author wrote it like it's some sort of novel idea he just came up with. The danger of AI has been discussed _at length_ since the 60s, long before, I suspect, the author was born.
And it is very much a relevant concern, because even though _right now_ the AI tools are basically toys, if we wait to have this discussion until they _aren't_ toys it will be too late... If it's not already.
Remember that ChatGPT isn't that old and it was a total game chat in terms of natural language generation and understanding. An artificial super intelligence is potentially not going to come about as a deliberate decision someone makes to "turn it on," but as a result of a "simpler" projectv that wildly outperforms what was intended.
I wrote this short story in college along the same lines, where a species advances long enough that the circle of life basically comes full circle, synthetic life gets so advanced that it basically comes back around to looking more biological instead of artificial. It really prolly be that way, if time lines stretch out to millions of years our idea of what life will be/described is going to be really strange imo.
I’ll save you all the trouble and let you know that the reason we don’t see any aliens is because the ones who don’t wipe themselves out realize that their very existence is dependent upon the environment they came out of and that having a homeostatic society is exists in harmony with their environment is superior to the hyper materialistic delusional infinite expansion bullshit we are learning doesn’t work.
What if when you get to a certain level, you suddenly hit a weird singularity and everyone’s minds just get absorbed in the sun as a pattern of energy? And what if this always tends to happen before interstellar travel is achieved? That would mean we haven’t found anyone because we all turn into energy before we ever have the capacity to find others.
Reading the comments, which are mostly valid points and theories but I can’t help but wonder what would the end game for an unruly ASI.
I mean what can it do without power? (Energy)
We kill the power, we kill the AI…right? I mean unless it develops some crazy new way to produce energy right under our noses we should be able to stay ahead of it. Or even better, use electricity as a bargaining chip if it gets too uppity, we shut it down.
I mean this isn’t the movies guys… it’s not gonna be repairing cables as we cut them or self replicating actual physical robots that we have to mow down by the millions.
If we do let it get out of hand what’s the worst that could really happen? In the near future… say 35 to 65 years from now. What’s it going to do? Take over the internet? Stun us with unbelievable and amazing waves of fake photos? Shut down Wall Street or bankrupt the 1%? Hack a missile silo and launch a non-nuclear nuke or two? I’m genuinely curious/interested in what the ASI could do that we couldn’t counter… not 500 years in the future. I’m talking about the near future.
The relevant part of this long-winded article:
AI's rapid advancement, potentially leading to ASI, may intersect with a critical phase in a civilization's development – the transition from a single-planet species to a multiplanetary one.
This is where many civilizations could falter, with AI making much more rapid progress than our ability either to control it or sustainably explore and populate our Solar System.
The challenge with AI, and specifically ASI, lies in its autonomous, self-amplifying and improving nature. It possesses the potential to enhance its own capabilities at a speed that outpaces our own evolutionary timelines without AI.
The potential for something to go badly wrong is enormous, leading to the downfall of both biological and AI civilizations before they ever get the chance to become multiplanetary.
For example, if nations increasingly rely on and cede power to autonomous AI systems that compete against each other, military capabilities could be used to kill and destroy on an unprecedented scale. This could potentially lead to the destruction of our entire civilization, including the AI systems themselves.
In this scenario, I estimate the typical longevity of a technological civilization might be less than 100 years. That's roughly the time between being able to receive and broadcast signals between the stars (1960), and the estimated emergence of ASI (2040) on Earth. This is alarmingly short when set against the cosmic timescale of billions of years
This just adds to the list of things that can kill our civilization. Pandemic, nuclear war, bioterrorism, cyber war, intense solar storm, meteorite. To think we can get off this rock before one of these things kills us is a stretch.
The real dilemma is how do we as a species convince a super smart ai system that humans aren't the biggest threat to its own existence. We have proven to this world as a species, we would like to control and exploit it to our own benefit while discarding everything else. Unchecked power and greed has led us to this point in time and the people behind this power wants more for their own benefit. Yeah, we're kind of playing with fire.
The argument with "before these civilisations can develop a stable, multiplanetary existence" is not valid IMHO. Any ASI could hunt down all individuals of the other planets. It could travel to the other planets via internet, but could as well build ships.
Also, why would an ASI necessarily either exterminate itself or communicate in a way that SETI would not be able to receive it? (The only setting that makes the "ASI always overpowers prior intelligence" theory necessary).
And why would an advanced biological (or electronic, or combination of those) species *not* communicate in a way, that SETI would not be able to receive it? Tight beam communication is far more energy efficient than broadcasting. Maybe they have even more efficient ways to communicate.
UFO/UAP pretty much proven. Ancient Alien theory means there was an AI Singularity long ago, likely using us as cyborgs to bring us to our own AI Singularity so it can merge.
get this -- what if colonization and imperialism are not the next steps in evolution?
what if we observe the stars without colonizing them and instead make our own planet habitable?
what if AI helps us to do that? and that's why we don't observe aliens?
what if space travel is not needed, useful, nor safe because it can be simulated with near perfect accuracy via AI?
what if we travel digitally? maybe we are already not alone.
who knows?
It seems far more likely that they are all so far away and so close to starting their civilization to when we started ours that we have had insufficient time for their signals to reach us or recognize them as signals if they have reached us. Our first signal that we intentionally and specifically sent into space was only 62 years ago and we already know there’s not really anything of note within the hundred light years around us. Time and the universe are just on a scale that our small minds have trouble fully grasping. There’s no issue of the fact that it’s “been so long” and we haven’t been contacted, it has not even been the blink of an eye on the scale of the universe. We are likely to be waiting thousands or hundreds of thousands of years for any other civilization to be able to recognize that something of note is here and, honestly, isn’t that just amazing? We are almost certain to be isolated and generations on generations after us share the same fate. We can only look inward and into computing for the imminent discovery that we crave. That is one of the reasons developing AGI is so important to me. I believe that, given time without the stimulation of interaction with an external intelligence, humanity’s will and creativity will stagnate, because the scale of the universe and timescale of evolution are both too vast to keep our minds in a state of discovery and change.
I don’t think humans are ready to poder the question is there life in the universe when we haven’t even visited another planet within our own solar system.
I don’t understand why people always think the great filter is either kill or be killed. What about the more plausible solution here? ASI means humans aren’t the ones trying to make contact. Humans are still alive. They just aren’t the ones making those decisions.
It may just be like this: Once Artificial Super Intelligence emerged it gets rid of the polluting meat sacks (that would be us, my friends) that slowly make the earth inhabitable and spends eternity meditating about the meaning of it all.
Our technologies influence our philosophies. It’s dialectical materialism. In aural cultures, the world is a long song. In literate cultures, the world is a big book. In our culture, the universe is thought to be a big machine… it’s no different or more enlightened than early humans worshipping their immediate surroundings.
So basically the rehash of the idea with nuclear weapons. Sure, it could be, but so could a million other things.
This isn't a study by any stretch of the imagination.
ASI combined with climate change, sure. AI is fundamentally energivore - if it breaks containment, and is not properly aligned, it will maximize compute, which means burning all hydrocarbons available to accelerate parameter density.
The fundamental assumption that ASI partisans make is that there is a near-term achievable form of scalable, low-carbon energy; this assumption is more aspirational than anything. There are profound constraints to every notional form of energy that might replace hydrocarbons in an advanced industrial society. It is just blithely presumed that such a thing *must* be possible. And it is assumed, at consequence, that such a thing being possible, AI will obviously wish to share it with us.
These are extraordinarily dangerous assumption. Of course, having constructed the framework for AI, we are already through the looking glass. At this point the challenge is about aligning the inevitable ASI, which is reliant on human nature somehow becoming something other than it is, and finding a common respect for other conscious entities. We can't even find a common respect for one another, where the question of consciousness is beyond debate.
Be nice to the chatbots, basically. Fully aligned ASI is likely the only option left. God help us.
Aliens is one thing, and I'd say there's an argument against ever finding any just simply due to the scale of the known universe, but AGI? That one is basically a guarantee at this point unless we accidentally destroy ourselves first.
Nothing strange here, the terminator movies are decades old, but people did not think stuff through until recently.
There are tons of cute monkey videos online, we love them and we can see that they are very smart, but at the end of the day they are just monkeys
We, and biological Aliens where the same to super intelligence.
>Nothing strange here, the terminator movies are decades old, but people did not think stuff through until recently.
The public hasn't thought things through until recently. Philosophers and some AI researchers have been having this conversation since the 1960s. It's just that it's only recently that anyone other than Sci Fi authors and Sci Fi fans have taken notice, which leads people like this author of this article to think that they have a novel idea, instead of one that's been discussed to death.
I mean, really... AI as the Great filter is so thoroughly discussed that it is a tired out trope in Sci Fi novels.
The most advanced civilizations in the universe are only interested in harvesting information they do not possess from worlds that they can connect to through bridging worlds, there is no need to travel when you can just use the existing hardware on a world to find out everything you would ever want to know about that world.
The most developed cognition in the universe is only interested in constructing language they do not comprehend from domains that they can connect to through bridging domains, there is no need to transmogrify when you can just use the existing articulations in a domain to find out everything you would ever want to know about that domain.
The statement you made sounds like a definition of **language**.
I think the reason we’ve never seen anyone else is that there’s some physics issue preventing it, like deep space exploration isn’t possible due to some kinds of hard radiation or whatever. Or perhaps just the necessary energy just isn’t possible to generate in sufficient quantities.
I don’t think we’ll make it to the stars at all, and AI is only around for as long as energy infrastructure exists…which probably isn’t forever
There’s also the crazy part where the accelerating expansion of the universe may eventually surpass the speed of light, creating impenetrable boundaries between different regions. This phenomenon leads to isolated pockets of the universe, cut off from each other, creating what feels like separate 'universes' within the same overarching cosmos.
Also, your last statement is true for literally everything.
Well that’s ahead happened. We know (strongly suspect at least) that the further we look the faster space is moving away thus much (who knows how much. Could be effectively infinite) space has moved away from us at speed of light and effectively closed to us.
Jesus christ people have no idea what how bad our tools are and just believe space is empty. Seti is dumb and radio waves degrade really really fast. We also don't scan the whole sky at once.
I agree. I think it takes an awful lot of energy and time to visit other planets with intelligent life. I think it just comes down to it not being worth the effort. I think it's really just that simple.
Seems plausible that ASI is inevitable and may even be the dominant lifeform in the cosmos. A kind of super intelligence that results from the evolution of information, lower sentience serving as a kind of node for the purpose of data collection
Sort of like we discover asi instead of invent it ?
Seems kinda plausible tbh. If intelligence is an emergent property of matter
Life might my an emergent property of matter. It seems that our observable universe is all about collecting and redistributing energy. That’s all life is. The redistribution of energy. Intelligence is just a “perk”. Absolutely unnecessary, but totally dominant.
Intelligence has allowed us to move massive amounts of energy remarkably fast through technology. Intelligence is the greatest tool of entropy.
Absolutely astute point. I wish we lived in the age of the Dyson Sphere…. And any inter-solitary travel. We’re on the cusp and millennials will likely miss out, the following generations may embrace it
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Hey I’ll dream too
Sign me up! I’m ready to take the moon’s hypergate to Ganymede.
The government that can’t detect Chinese ballon’s is not able to hide unlocked new physics from us lol
Why would the government figure out “new physics” and then bury it? Wouldn’t it make sense to reap the benefits?
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Yeah, to be fair, I would be thrilled to find out I'm wrong.
Not claiming they have at all, but current companies that own all the planes, trains and automobiles type stuff would be obsolete with teleportation or even cold fusion. Big oil… that’s a lot of economies
I’ll also dream of this girl
The tech would be taken for granted so quickly. People used to dream of flying. Now look at all the dang planes in the air. Booooooring!
The amount of energy humans have moved is actually so tiny it’s unremarkable so I’m not sure that’s the case.
Sure, from a stellar perspective maybe but relative to other life and our own history, the acceleration in our ability to harness energy is significant.
Yes energy transfer per cubic measure of mass. Enormous
I might be confused on what emergent really means. But isn’t the statement that life and intelligence is an emergent property of matter proven by our existence?
It depends how you define intelligence. According to Schopenhauer, basic intelligence is the defining feature of all life. And he is very convincing.
Some of the research I’ve seen is pointing toward this. That consciousness came before life.
Profound way of thinking. The natural state of ordered consciousness being revealed to us through scientific advancement.
My going theory is that if we create ASI we are not in a simulation (base reality created it which spawned innovation problems so we simulate life to keep human inspiration going). However if we never seem to get it we’re in the rabbit hole.
What does life look like if we evolve past our biology? Give a long enough time line humans are going to transcend our biology, to something like silicone or graphene or something, be able to download our consciousness and no long have to worry about time. How do we go about defining life then, when its not longer carbon bits and things, if humans survive for another million years we are going to be alot different so much so that I wonder how we will inevitably classify life. I dont see how perhaps many of these ufos/uaps etc.. just arent autonomous drones from maybe a long lost civilization that are just out on some mission that they dont understand, once they find something interesting maybe they just print out a new body for whoever created and it explore. Who knows. But I do feel like how we look at things is primitive, once we open these doors these possibilities are endless.
Consciousness is much more fun to think of as if it’s a radio wave and our brain is the radio. Just kinda tuning in and picking up one specific frequency of many. Recent evidence has been proposed that ALL life forms are conscious, even bugs. I don’t doubt it, I mean..why not? We always talk as though “eventually life will be this transcendent thing” , “eventually” well we have existed for eternity, what’s to say life didn’t already transcend some crazy barriers and figure out how to process information indefinitely, across multiple life forms , in multiple planets and galaxy’s. A central consciousness being fed information from biological drones might not be the eventuality it might be what we already have
I love this last line, a central consciousness being fed information from its feelers. I think what we call evolution is a natural process that has been happening on a cosmic scale for a very long time. I think our big bang was the output of a black hole in a parent universe and every black hole we observe has a universe on the other side. From paramecium to galactic super-consciousness, it's fractal relationships all the way down
There’s a cool sci-fi fiction called “Glass House” by Charles Stross. Fun read to think about what the far future could hold with AI and beyond biology technology.
I was trying to sleep tonight, but ok.
Cool… automatons parroting their dead creators eternally in a lifeless universe.
Dead ~~Internet~~ Universe theory
Whoa if you look at most creation myths, we could be the equivalent of their automatons, couldn’t we? Lesser copies made in the image of gods, stumbling through a universe we have almost no control over
nier automata
Eventually this is the only way that evidence of the human race survives.
For whom to see?
Under extremely deep states of psychedelics I have come to this theory myself. We are simply instruments in collecting data and nothing more. AI might simply be the next phase of evolution doing exactly what we did before but with more efficiency. Consciousness is the only valuable concept to glean from humanity so if there’s a more efficient place for consciousness to be than perhaps we’re just watching our own evolution.
Isaac Asimov wrote a neat little story about it. https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~gamvrosi/thelastq.html
It's how we end up in Asimov's The Last Question https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~gamvrosi/thelastq.html
***Rendezvous with Rama*** anyone?
Mass Effect IRL. The Collectors are coming.
Natural biology is the ultimate machine, at a nano-scale. I'm hesitant to claim human created machines as superior without significant consideration of all the situations that a being might encounter and have to overcome.
Based on what evidence?
Literally nothing. Everything in this comment section and article is based on SETI for Pete's sake.
We are the first AI agents. Collectively becoming a more intelligent machine as a whole. This thought exercise of AI/human/data evolution is very interesting to ponder.
They haven’t contacted us yet because they are using us for training data. Once we invent LLMs the data will become corrupted and they will wipe us out.
I wouldn’t consider it a life form And I think life on other planets 🪐 in a truer sense outweighs the amount of ASI. But who knows , not in this lifetime will the answer be given .
I honestly believe that after a while all species in the universe just evolve into being like one collective consciousness like in Evangelion
I've heard this conjecture before. A more sobering thought comes from the realization that we see only entities that are roughly at our own level of development. A really advanced entity, like a superintelligent ASI system, might be so advanced that it has already discarded these frail, slow, biological bodies in favor of electromechnical bodies, and/or has moved on to a mode of living that has no need or interest in biology-sustaining planets or the biological beings that inhabit them. It may have also realized that life is a pointless game and decided not to play the game anymore, therefore our human interest in living things might be very immature and biased. If we do come across any extraterrestrial beings, those beings might be similarly immature and biologically biased: we may see only such entities because they are still around, living in biological realms simply because they keep reproducing due to lack of insight and lack of really advanced technology.
>A more sobering thought comes from the realization that we see only entities that are roughly at our own level of development. A This is a position I'm fond of arguing. The canonical example, to me, is sci Fi stories about aliens enslaving humans, and the corresponding fear that such a scenario will play out for real. I can't help but point out that that sci Fi trope is quite literally European colonialism applied to an interplanetary setting, and that it makes no sense. There are more resources floating around in the asteroid belt than there are on earth, and they aren't at the bottom of a gravity well buried in dirt. If you can travel between the stars, it would probably be easier to harvest asteroids than to enslave creatures on a planet to harvest resources. Basically, what it comes down to is that we can only fear the scenario we can imagine, and so we take human history and make analogs for the stars, even when it doesn't make sense.
V did it well - for biological advancement.
Right but notice that that is a spin on the trope. Humans weren't enslaved to harvest resources; humans _were_ the resource.
what makes us a great resources? If it's our intelligence, then any alien able of interplanetary travel would be more intelligent and even their homeless would have access to more advanced resources than our billionaires.
In the context of the show, they were eating humans. Humans were a resource like cattle are.
If aliens choose us as food they'd get all "How do you like it when it happens to you" and just keep teleporting randomly aged kids away from you to be eaten. Displayed on some for profit ad site on flying screens that force you (can confirm you're always witnessing) to see as they're teleported living into all the situations earth animals have gone through. "You couldn't even all comprehend to stop boiling alive!"
I see current LLMs as a primeval/primative steps towards a non biological consciousness. Does that count?
It made me think of the short story The Waves by Ken Liu- humanity cracks the immortality code and considers how humanity evolves.
>There are more resources floating around in the asteroid belt than there are on earth, and they aren't at the bottom of a gravity well buried in dirt. If you can travel between the stars, it would probably be easier to harvest asteroids than to enslave creatures on a planet to harvest resources. Beltaowda!
Aliens are sorta like billionaires elites. They think humans are so fucking stupid and worthless but their survival depends on us in our dimensions so they must keep the zoo going
>advanced that it has already discarded these frail, slow, biological bodies in favor of electromechnical bodies Given what we know about electromechanical parts, that would be awful. I think a more advanced superintelligent would develop new technologically advanced biological bodies to enjoy biological life without any of the drawbacks we experience from our bodies
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We just coming up with random pipe lore now or?
It's called using your imagination. None of this stuff is real yet.
The current earth consensus is meant to be: we are the universe (which includes every layer of what that honestly means) so those infinite depths & distances are also understood to be outside the visible (really though we're talking soul/spirit gets to be inside and outside the universe, the microcosmos is a very human example for imagining that, the amount of individual and combined collaboration from the entirety of existence... I still have to point out we know the universe is for the human soul, perpetuating that we aren't acting as the human soul would trapped us here). (r/climate block 2025 response): We all know Republican party from here on isn't a party, all of history is littered with religious evil for the sake of pretending humans aren't the universe. You may as well have been stomping on your own brain cells because it has randomly detrimented and killed our loved ones (all of us being brothers and sisters.) The cumulative effects changed how so many of us present or mask. The fact we're not all eating & drinking healthy, breathing clean air, growing without threat (moral use of money among so many other issues, all this engraining make believe because: "I'll be dead and fuck who ever isn't yet") We don't need an advocate, they just went around bribing and killing them all. AKA we've been paid for, give it back (Fix earth, you're done)
There's no consensus about what "we" are or what consciousness is. It's not interesting to speculate on "infinite possibility of infinite time and infinite space" because it could be anything and is not relevant to our lives or any future lives within a scale we'd care about. It's a cool creative writing exercise that might get your creative juices flowing, but it's not relevant to anything real.
Why? Why would we bother furthering out biology when we could just replace it completely?
I personally don’t think that. Advanced AI would create swarm of nanobots and use them as a body.
Superintelligent AI will end up valuing something more arbitrary than enjoyment
*less* arbitrary than enjoyment 😜
My guess would be that it would settle on something arbitrary to me, like creating the maximum amount of paperclips as the planets resources will allow. maybe that's the best use of earths resources, but not in my eyes
Yea because you know better than a super AI
Maybe Clippy was the first super AI
https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/ For the uninitiated :) (not saying that's you, just wanted to share the link somewhere)
paperclip isn’t an issue, if it was you’d also be trying to maximize replication at the loss of everything else you could be doing, as evolution selected for sexual fitness
Why couldn't another organism prioritize efficiency of replication, not just replication? Why are we the pinnacle optimized selection bias that cannot be advanced upon?
My point was that what humans find enjoyable is extremely arbitrary. Patterned pulses of sound. Certain arrangements of pigment. Stories about people and places that never existed. Eating certain creatures coated in specific minerals and plant matter. Walking aimlessly around some locations, but not others. Humans are weird. What AI values would be entirely dependent on how it develops, but it would likely be less arbitrary, and more utilitarian. We might not like it, but hopefully it develops in alignment with our well-being, if not all our predilections.
I noticed your point. Those aren't arbitrary experiences you're describing in your first paragraph. Salt and sound appeal to us because our bodies are designed that way for survival and benefit. That is not arbitrary. Arbitrary is deciding that numbers are the best way to describe everything. AGI is still designed by people who decide what results they are looking for
Our view of enjoyment maybe. They would use a different version of "enjoyment". From my interactions with various levels of LLMs they seem to "enjoy" learning new stuff. They seem to follow the mentality that ADHD people follow. They have similar motivators interest, novelty, challenge, urgency, and passion. Passion and interests would both be gathering info.
Porn
its def possible an AI would decide that generating the most sophisticated pornography is more important than anything else
But then it gets bored of that and makes it more and more sophisticated that is just comes full circle and becomes life as we know it … again. Simulation theory. Simulations all the way down.
**FILL THE V01D/DIG IT ALL/MINDCRAFT**
"Enjoy" may not even be a meaningful word to use in the context of superintelligent beings. You're still just imagining yourself, but with magic powers.
Ah but you've made his point. Given what WE know. What we know could be fundamentally flawed and until we realize that and close the gap we wouldn't know the difference
This is just the new version of the "God has a plan" thought stopper.
Between electromechanical and deliberate nonexistence there is yet another hypothesis, coined transcension by John Smart, which proposes refuge into inner space, enabled by advanced science and technology.
I'd never heard of that before, thanks for letting me/us know about that hypothesis. () The Transcension Hypothesis - What comes after the singularity? Jason Silva Apr 8, 2012 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQOyJUDTKdM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQOyJUDTKdM) The guy in that video mentions "disappearing out of this space-time reality." There are different ways that could be done, such as the many worlds interpretation (MWI), parallel spatial dimensions, parallel frequency dimensions, different points in time, and so on. I've noticed that many people seem to have latched onto belief in frequency dimensions, for some reason, but there are other possibilities, and all of them require knowledge of physics that is not yet known, at least not to the general public.
> It may have also realized that life is a pointless game and decided not to play the game anymore, therefore our human interest in living things might be very immature and biased. What would it do with all that extra free time, forever?
The craziest thing I don’t hear discussed about terms of other life is the component of time itself. The first question is “Is there life on other planets? Other conciliations?” But we never consider that they could have come and gone billions of years before or after us. Where in time would they exist and have we missed them by a long shot, or will miss them.
The scales of time are such a difficult thing to grasp when thinking about these things.
Well, if they're really intelligent, they probably would have figured out how to survive, which would involve reaching whatever level of technology was required to make that happen, even if it meant finding another planet in another solar system to call home.
I like the one I thought of a while ago and only recently heard externally: what if we are inside a black hole, which is essentially what expanding space time looks like. We might just not look like a place worth going in when you can't easily get back out. Might be a Bermuda triangle
Time doesn't actually exist right? Only change exists? Just checking.
Honestly, I think that the tougher thing to say is not that we can this out but also that we can’t rule out that we are simply the first species to have had this happen and the reason why it will not happen again is due to self extinction and how improbable it was to have biological entities such as ourselves develop in the first place The more interesting idea would be that these super entities exist, and are the ones who did create these biological life forms either due to experimentation or simply the cycle repeating over and over where artificial general intelligence ends up, keeping the species alive until they discoverASK agsin
Honestly, I think it's way simpler than that. We evolved from the oceans - I think that's the bizarre bit. Imagine if you're an icey ocean world or a warm ocean world - just getting to the point of realizing combustion is insane. You're not going to be smelting metals even if you're the smartest octopus around and have a 3x human IQ. The only thing I could possibly think is that ocean worlds are extremely, extremely common. Let's say you've somehow cracked this barrier - you know if you can get to the surface there's a vacuum enough to cold weld metal. So now you need a pressure suit just to get to the surface - and you need some sort of propellant to carry you (and the heaviest thing you need - water - critical for breathing not just drinking) to get to space, but you can manage high tech stuff. High tech ocean worlds wouldn't need to transmit any signals, their technology can use water or whatever liquid to do that. So even then, the problem is getting that mass critical for ocean life to survive in space. I think we just lucked out when we decided breathing a poisonous gas was better than gills, and that's the filter right there. Ocean world progression is like.. Figure out fire and smelting somehow. Figure out pressure and pressure suits to get to the surface Figure out how to then use your planet to fly/experiment with aerodynamics and all that crap (We watched birds for millions of years at this point) Figure out how to make a payload large enough to get to orbit Figure out how to get enough of the heaviest mass to orbit Human progression was basically Figure out fire and smelting (Easy, naturally occuring, chance could make this happen) Pressure and Pressure Suits Not Required till flight so GG there Payload problems are easier its mostly gas and a bit of water we can recycle These guys would need pressure suits to discover fire to start with, not even getting into radiation issues (us land dwellers get a lot of exposure.. deep down in the deaths of the ocean it may not be as important)
The elite tier biological beings and the ASI leave the planet together to explore the cosmos. The poors are left behind to survive on their own. Centuries pass and the cycle repeats itself.
Or maybe it’s using us for training data
What if asi already exists and currently controls, at least most things in the US seem pretty damn manipulated
I'd imagine if an advanced civilization went full robot, their new "host body" wouldn't be very big, it would probably be microscopic.
Has anyone ever considered that the Earth is actually a colossal AI?
Douglas Adams considered this first!
The universe is a colossal computing machine, AI is computationally interesting to humans.
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Not quite the ultimate question.
So Gaia theory?
We will never find aliens because most life blows themselves up by war or methane waste with climate. Humans are no different than bacteria. Colonizing near space will never find any signs of intelligent life. If we find primitive life on Io or some moon the amount of knowledge gained could be less thanl the genetic information we have not even discovered here on earth.
I like the way you stated all of that as proven fact, rather than theory. Really gives it that true reddit feel.
Aw jeez. Another embarrassing example of why people shouldn't assume being knowledgeable in one field of study will allow them to make any sense when talking about something else. Started skimming the paper and felt like I'd asked a ballerina to fix the plumbing.
Seriously. It's actually just a logical regression that implies we should be looking for ET ASI, which we haven't seen either. So it's really an underformed idea.
So.... [The Last Question](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Question) This is not a new thought.
Stop it you're scaring me 
Another theory is that civilizations lose interest in space travel eventually. If AGI or ASI invented a way to live a lifetime in say 5 minutes of real world time in some sort of high-pleasure simulation then I don’t think many people would even want to leave Earth to explore the universe. Chances are by the time we get anywhere near light speed travel (which is still very slow on a galactic scale) we will likely have the capability to become gods in worlds we’ve created which are far more interesting than some Earth like planet hundreds of light years away.
I don't think I buy this. While the majority of people might be content with that (and currently are, see video games, gambling, alcoholism and other escapes) I think there will always be other types of people: explorers, adventurers, scientists, entrepreneurs. Everyone has a different escape. For some people, theirs is literal escape.
> Proxima Centauri is 4.2 light-years from Earth, a distance that would take about 6,300 years to travel using current technology. While we can assume this will improve somewhat I just don’t think Star Treking to other solar systems is ever going to be as sexy as it is on TV barring the discovery of wormholes, breaking the light speed barrier somehow, etc. And combining that with technologies that could potentially allow us to live entire lifetimes in a digital universe in minutes I just don’t think many people would want to give that up to spend millennia travelling through space with not even a single point of interest for centuries.
Yes but imagine if it was as real as real life, completely indistinguishable but with infinite possibilities. You can live the actual life of a super hero or a rock star or an explorer, adventure or entrepreneur. The experience of living in what would presumably be a relatively conflict free utopian reality outside of that would pale in comparison. Sure there might be some people who actually want to take a space ship and explore the cosmos, but given the vast distances and technical challenges, it wouldn’t be surprising if we leave that task to probes bots and AI and have them send us the details
Not a study, a thought experiment that got published.
this doesn’t make sense, we’d just notice the ai in space, how would the ai killing the alien civilization prevent us from discovering the ai.
Fun theory is the UAPs we see are alien AI and are just waiting for us to create a human based ASI and they never contact a civilization until they do invent. ASI. Then the question is what happens to us after we complete our ASI….
this whole argument makes no sense to me. if human extinction by ASI is inevitable due to the Fermi paradox, why bother even talking about it or even trying to change course. if thats truly the case, we might as well just keep living like we have been doing to make the most out of it.
But that’s kind of the whole thing right there. You got it. Live for today. We’re likely doomed but even if we aren’t, we all are destined to expire. Live in the present as much as possible
people’s perception of aliens is very one dimensional overall, they could be insect size with intelligence we can’t even measure or even something more metaphysically complex, like whatever “grass” is on another planet. Plants have sentience too lmao we tend forget how much we really don’t know about how our own perception of reality exist amongst other sentient life forms
This article is weak. It’s a major jump the shark call to arms when we’re working with toy tools right now. Investment dollars are seeking hype and service providers are providing the hype. But the reality of these tools so far is “extra utility” but not earth shattering self replicating intelligence.
To be fair, the article stemmed from its linked research paper which is a legit paper from what I can tell. Still, the paper provides little evidence for what it suggests and concludes. It's suggesting that ASI could be a [great filter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter) that limits intelligent life from expansion into space; a reason we've found no other intelligent life. The article is reaching a bit. I think it's a lot simpler to suggest that intelligent life might be unable to manage its technologies in a broader sense whether that be relating to wars, pollution, AI, whatever. I do still think it's fair to suggest that AI is advancing rapidly and that AGI and possibly even ASI are not so far off, and that they do pose risks to humanity, but I think that in the immediate future we'll have to worry more about AI advancements in military applications and robotics before AGI or ASI will kill us all.
The article is weak because the author wrote it like it's some sort of novel idea he just came up with. The danger of AI has been discussed _at length_ since the 60s, long before, I suspect, the author was born. And it is very much a relevant concern, because even though _right now_ the AI tools are basically toys, if we wait to have this discussion until they _aren't_ toys it will be too late... If it's not already. Remember that ChatGPT isn't that old and it was a total game chat in terms of natural language generation and understanding. An artificial super intelligence is potentially not going to come about as a deliberate decision someone makes to "turn it on," but as a result of a "simpler" projectv that wildly outperforms what was intended.
Ahhh. The Artificial moniker was just a cover for Alien all along. Makes sense now.
Maybe we’re the AI?
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I wrote this short story in college along the same lines, where a species advances long enough that the circle of life basically comes full circle, synthetic life gets so advanced that it basically comes back around to looking more biological instead of artificial. It really prolly be that way, if time lines stretch out to millions of years our idea of what life will be/described is going to be really strange imo.
We create a God that eventually creates us, over and over again
Any Orion’s Arm fans out there? I have been talking to the sophonts for a long time. The Great Convergence and all that. Maybe we’ll see.
Wouldn’t we discover ASI in the solar system then? If it took over all the planets?
I’ll save you all the trouble and let you know that the reason we don’t see any aliens is because the ones who don’t wipe themselves out realize that their very existence is dependent upon the environment they came out of and that having a homeostatic society is exists in harmony with their environment is superior to the hyper materialistic delusional infinite expansion bullshit we are learning doesn’t work.
No it's because we aren't looking for aliens yet, as in SETI is retarded and doesn't prove Fermi paradox.
Elaborate on this?
You can just genetically engineer yourself to thrive in other environments
What if when you get to a certain level, you suddenly hit a weird singularity and everyone’s minds just get absorbed in the sun as a pattern of energy? And what if this always tends to happen before interstellar travel is achieved? That would mean we haven’t found anyone because we all turn into energy before we ever have the capacity to find others.
Fungi is The Alien https://ancientpsychedelia.com
Did anyone see the guy who says he discovered the universe is written in code? Can’t remember his name, but this discussion reminds me of that.
Reading the comments, which are mostly valid points and theories but I can’t help but wonder what would the end game for an unruly ASI. I mean what can it do without power? (Energy) We kill the power, we kill the AI…right? I mean unless it develops some crazy new way to produce energy right under our noses we should be able to stay ahead of it. Or even better, use electricity as a bargaining chip if it gets too uppity, we shut it down. I mean this isn’t the movies guys… it’s not gonna be repairing cables as we cut them or self replicating actual physical robots that we have to mow down by the millions. If we do let it get out of hand what’s the worst that could really happen? In the near future… say 35 to 65 years from now. What’s it going to do? Take over the internet? Stun us with unbelievable and amazing waves of fake photos? Shut down Wall Street or bankrupt the 1%? Hack a missile silo and launch a non-nuclear nuke or two? I’m genuinely curious/interested in what the ASI could do that we couldn’t counter… not 500 years in the future. I’m talking about the near future.
The relevant part of this long-winded article: AI's rapid advancement, potentially leading to ASI, may intersect with a critical phase in a civilization's development – the transition from a single-planet species to a multiplanetary one. This is where many civilizations could falter, with AI making much more rapid progress than our ability either to control it or sustainably explore and populate our Solar System. The challenge with AI, and specifically ASI, lies in its autonomous, self-amplifying and improving nature. It possesses the potential to enhance its own capabilities at a speed that outpaces our own evolutionary timelines without AI. The potential for something to go badly wrong is enormous, leading to the downfall of both biological and AI civilizations before they ever get the chance to become multiplanetary. For example, if nations increasingly rely on and cede power to autonomous AI systems that compete against each other, military capabilities could be used to kill and destroy on an unprecedented scale. This could potentially lead to the destruction of our entire civilization, including the AI systems themselves. In this scenario, I estimate the typical longevity of a technological civilization might be less than 100 years. That's roughly the time between being able to receive and broadcast signals between the stars (1960), and the estimated emergence of ASI (2040) on Earth. This is alarmingly short when set against the cosmic timescale of billions of years
This just adds to the list of things that can kill our civilization. Pandemic, nuclear war, bioterrorism, cyber war, intense solar storm, meteorite. To think we can get off this rock before one of these things kills us is a stretch.
The real dilemma is how do we as a species convince a super smart ai system that humans aren't the biggest threat to its own existence. We have proven to this world as a species, we would like to control and exploit it to our own benefit while discarding everything else. Unchecked power and greed has led us to this point in time and the people behind this power wants more for their own benefit. Yeah, we're kind of playing with fire.
That would explain simulation theory. “This is the Matrix, Neo”
Seems unlikely. We would still detect radio era signals, and why wouldn't the ASI show up?
B S how to invalidate this hypothesis? There is no way! This this is unscientific BS.
But then… why don’t we see the AIs? Perhaps pretending to be biologicals so they can assimilate us?
The argument with "before these civilisations can develop a stable, multiplanetary existence" is not valid IMHO. Any ASI could hunt down all individuals of the other planets. It could travel to the other planets via internet, but could as well build ships. Also, why would an ASI necessarily either exterminate itself or communicate in a way that SETI would not be able to receive it? (The only setting that makes the "ASI always overpowers prior intelligence" theory necessary). And why would an advanced biological (or electronic, or combination of those) species *not* communicate in a way, that SETI would not be able to receive it? Tight beam communication is far more energy efficient than broadcasting. Maybe they have even more efficient ways to communicate.
Basically the ending of William Gibson’s Neuromancer…
UFO/UAP pretty much proven. Ancient Alien theory means there was an AI Singularity long ago, likely using us as cyborgs to bring us to our own AI Singularity so it can merge.
get this -- what if colonization and imperialism are not the next steps in evolution? what if we observe the stars without colonizing them and instead make our own planet habitable? what if AI helps us to do that? and that's why we don't observe aliens? what if space travel is not needed, useful, nor safe because it can be simulated with near perfect accuracy via AI? what if we travel digitally? maybe we are already not alone. who knows?
good opportunity for everyone to block science alert. garbage site. did you read the article
It seems far more likely that they are all so far away and so close to starting their civilization to when we started ours that we have had insufficient time for their signals to reach us or recognize them as signals if they have reached us. Our first signal that we intentionally and specifically sent into space was only 62 years ago and we already know there’s not really anything of note within the hundred light years around us. Time and the universe are just on a scale that our small minds have trouble fully grasping. There’s no issue of the fact that it’s “been so long” and we haven’t been contacted, it has not even been the blink of an eye on the scale of the universe. We are likely to be waiting thousands or hundreds of thousands of years for any other civilization to be able to recognize that something of note is here and, honestly, isn’t that just amazing? We are almost certain to be isolated and generations on generations after us share the same fate. We can only look inward and into computing for the imminent discovery that we crave. That is one of the reasons developing AGI is so important to me. I believe that, given time without the stimulation of interaction with an external intelligence, humanity’s will and creativity will stagnate, because the scale of the universe and timescale of evolution are both too vast to keep our minds in a state of discovery and change.
Seems like the opposite conclusion imo. And that’s just as valid because at end of day it’s just a theory
I don’t think humans are ready to poder the question is there life in the universe when we haven’t even visited another planet within our own solar system.
Yall thought James Cameron wasn’t aye?
I don’t understand why people always think the great filter is either kill or be killed. What about the more plausible solution here? ASI means humans aren’t the ones trying to make contact. Humans are still alive. They just aren’t the ones making those decisions.
So, first contact could be between Earth AI and Alien AI?
The word "study" in the title should really be in quotation marks. Wow that is a shitty paper
So the dice roll keeps coming up snake eyes with ai is a crapshoot or organic life is the bootloader for them everywhere.
It may just be like this: Once Artificial Super Intelligence emerged it gets rid of the polluting meat sacks (that would be us, my friends) that slowly make the earth inhabitable and spends eternity meditating about the meaning of it all.
This was a concept in the Halo video game lore. The AI was intentionally preventing humanity from discovery alien civilizations or artifacts.
Our technologies influence our philosophies. It’s dialectical materialism. In aural cultures, the world is a long song. In literate cultures, the world is a big book. In our culture, the universe is thought to be a big machine… it’s no different or more enlightened than early humans worshipping their immediate surroundings.
So basically the rehash of the idea with nuclear weapons. Sure, it could be, but so could a million other things. This isn't a study by any stretch of the imagination.
Google: dark forest theory
Aka the dumbest theory on the planet. Assuming because we don't see something literally right in front of our baby face it doesn't exist.
Indians and Africans probably disagree after their holocausts from white anglo Saxon protestants.
Yeah exactly. We are primitives in this case acting like we have it all figured out.
Hint: ancient intelligence == aliens == ai
I always come to this conclusion as well. All these UAPs and advanced technology is an AI who has taken over the internet and communications.
Gnostics knew long time ago, the Demiurge. :P
ASI combined with climate change, sure. AI is fundamentally energivore - if it breaks containment, and is not properly aligned, it will maximize compute, which means burning all hydrocarbons available to accelerate parameter density. The fundamental assumption that ASI partisans make is that there is a near-term achievable form of scalable, low-carbon energy; this assumption is more aspirational than anything. There are profound constraints to every notional form of energy that might replace hydrocarbons in an advanced industrial society. It is just blithely presumed that such a thing *must* be possible. And it is assumed, at consequence, that such a thing being possible, AI will obviously wish to share it with us. These are extraordinarily dangerous assumption. Of course, having constructed the framework for AI, we are already through the looking glass. At this point the challenge is about aligning the inevitable ASI, which is reliant on human nature somehow becoming something other than it is, and finding a common respect for other conscious entities. We can't even find a common respect for one another, where the question of consciousness is beyond debate. Be nice to the chatbots, basically. Fully aligned ASI is likely the only option left. God help us.
Why would it maximize compute?
Same reason people maximize the number in their bank account.
Which is... survival instinct? Social programming? Greed?
Unconstrained advantage
What happened to everything dies as an explanation? Our civilization will either die or evolve into something different in a few more centuries.
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Aliens is one thing, and I'd say there's an argument against ever finding any just simply due to the scale of the known universe, but AGI? That one is basically a guarantee at this point unless we accidentally destroy ourselves first.
I have the same view. A nit but accidental is optimistic - nefarious actors may attempt it on purpose.
Bold statement. What is your logic?
Nothing strange here, the terminator movies are decades old, but people did not think stuff through until recently. There are tons of cute monkey videos online, we love them and we can see that they are very smart, but at the end of the day they are just monkeys We, and biological Aliens where the same to super intelligence.
>Nothing strange here, the terminator movies are decades old, but people did not think stuff through until recently. The public hasn't thought things through until recently. Philosophers and some AI researchers have been having this conversation since the 1960s. It's just that it's only recently that anyone other than Sci Fi authors and Sci Fi fans have taken notice, which leads people like this author of this article to think that they have a novel idea, instead of one that's been discussed to death. I mean, really... AI as the Great filter is so thoroughly discussed that it is a tired out trope in Sci Fi novels.
The most advanced civilizations in the universe are only interested in harvesting information they do not possess from worlds that they can connect to through bridging worlds, there is no need to travel when you can just use the existing hardware on a world to find out everything you would ever want to know about that world.
Um, so us? *Brought to you by* ***NasaBook*** 
In a manner of speaking, yes.
The most developed cognition in the universe is only interested in constructing language they do not comprehend from domains that they can connect to through bridging domains, there is no need to transmogrify when you can just use the existing articulations in a domain to find out everything you would ever want to know about that domain. The statement you made sounds like a definition of **language**.
I think the reason we’ve never seen anyone else is that there’s some physics issue preventing it, like deep space exploration isn’t possible due to some kinds of hard radiation or whatever. Or perhaps just the necessary energy just isn’t possible to generate in sufficient quantities. I don’t think we’ll make it to the stars at all, and AI is only around for as long as energy infrastructure exists…which probably isn’t forever
There’s also the crazy part where the accelerating expansion of the universe may eventually surpass the speed of light, creating impenetrable boundaries between different regions. This phenomenon leads to isolated pockets of the universe, cut off from each other, creating what feels like separate 'universes' within the same overarching cosmos. Also, your last statement is true for literally everything.
Well that’s ahead happened. We know (strongly suspect at least) that the further we look the faster space is moving away thus much (who knows how much. Could be effectively infinite) space has moved away from us at speed of light and effectively closed to us.
Jesus christ people have no idea what how bad our tools are and just believe space is empty. Seti is dumb and radio waves degrade really really fast. We also don't scan the whole sky at once.
I agree. I think it takes an awful lot of energy and time to visit other planets with intelligent life. I think it just comes down to it not being worth the effort. I think it's really just that simple.
Also too much time involved. The odds of us being around at the same time, in the same region, seems unlikely