RE: The future of AI?
March 30, 2016 at 11:43 am
(This post was last modified: March 30, 2016 at 11:45 am by JuliaL.)
(March 28, 2016 at 4:09 pm)Alex K Wrote:(March 28, 2016 at 3:04 pm)IATIA Wrote: Not necessarily. They may just have not found us yet (or decided we were not worth investigating or worse yet, dangerous), after all, just our galaxy alone is really huge and then the number of galaxies in our cosmos makes our milky way tiny by comparison.
Yeah... we haven't started broadcasting radio before 80 years ago. Even if there are millions of high level civilizations in the milkyway, I don't see how they would find us.
I think this was me parroting some vaguely remembered singularity based arguments I'd read on the internet.
But after a bit more investigation, whether this actually represents where my mind was while posting or not, my speculation parallels one of those used to explain the Fermi paradox.
Fermi came up with this during the early UFO craze of the late 1940s.
Quote:Herbert York recalls that Fermi followed up on his comment with a series of calculations on the probability of Earth-like planets, the probability of life, the likely rise and duration of high technology, etc., and concluded that we ought to have been visited long ago and many times over.I think there was some mixing also of the view that we're all in the matrix because it's computationally more economical than having access to a ground level reality. (I don't happen to buy this argument, but then I wouldn't if the simulation was good enough, would I?)
The proposed reasons in the Wikipedia entry that we don't see advanced civilizations everywhere include:
- Extraterrestrial life is rare or non-existent
- No other intelligent species have arisen
- Intelligent alien species lack advanced technology
- It is the nature of intelligent life to destroy itself
- It is the nature of intelligent life to destroy others
- Periodic extinction by natural events
- Inflation hypothesis and the youngness argument
- Intelligent civilizations are too far apart in space or time
- It is too expensive to spread physically throughout the galaxy
- Human beings have not existed long enough
- Humans are not listening properly
- Civilizations broadcast detectable radio signals only for a brief period of time
- They tend to isolate themselves
- They are too alien
- Everyone is listening, no one is transmitting
- Earth is deliberately not contacted
- Earth is purposely isolated (planetarium hypothesis)
- It is dangerous to communicate
- They are here undetected
- They are here unacknowledged
I believe I homed in on 4. because I tend to focus on our current existential problems (which I don't see being solved and on which I believe we should concentrate because we have a chance to effect change.) IATIA & Alex K looked to maybe be in 8., 10.,12., others. for reasons known to themselves. Perhaps they're just more optimistic than me.
As always, the internet (even just Wikipedia) knows more than I do.
So how, exactly, does God know that She's NOT a brain in a vat?
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