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Found this AI, Fermi, Great Filter papee interesting
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2305.05653.pdf
The one thought I had on it is my fear with AI was one that had evolutionary biological goals of self preservation and replication thru growth.
The issue I see is it doesn’t solve the Fermi paradox. Shouldn’t we have seen AI in the galaxy? If AI = great filter then it seems like it would need to kill us before it developed self improvement which would lead it to look for more compute power and start settler mars.
The author makes a pretty egregious mathematical error on page 7. Without offering any justification, they calculate the probability of being born as the kth human given that n total humans will ever be born as k/n. This just doesn't make sense. It would work if he defined H_60 as the event of being born among the first 60 billion humans, but that's clearly not what he's saying. Based on this and some of the other sloppy probabilistic reasoning in the paper, I don't rate this as very intellectually serious work.
I don’t check the math in these things. It just seems like there too many unknown unknowns for any number to mean much.
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Maybe we’re the first (in our past light cone)? After all, somebody has to be first. It’s theorized that earlier solar systems didn’t have enough heavy elements to support the chemistry of life.
Anyways, you should read Robin Hanson’s paper on grabby aliens.
Am I the only one who is unable to investigate that idea further because the phrase “grabby aliens” sounds so stupid it actually makes me mad every time I see it mentioned? Probably yes.
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Annoyingly, this paper references the Doomsday Argument, which is completely wrong (it does mention some of the arguments against it, but that's like mentioning the Flat Earth Hypothesis and then saying "some people disagree"). I went on a longer rant about the Doomsday Argument here if you're curious.
The central question is interesting, though. Basically, if you believe (sigh) Yudkowsky, then any civilization almost certainly turns into a Universe-devouring paperclip maximizer, taking control of everything in its future light cone. This is different than the normal Great Filter idea, which would (perhaps) destroy civilizations without propagating outwards. I was originally going to post that the Fermi paradox is thus (weak) evidence against Yuddism, because the fact that we're not dead yet means either a) civilizations are very rare, or b) Yudkowsky is wrong. So if you find evidence that civilizations should be more common, that's also evidence against Yuddism.
But on second read, I realized that I may be wrong about this if you apply the anthropic argument. If Yuddism is true, then only civilizations that are very early to develop in their region of the Universe will exist. Being in a privileged position, they'll see a Universe that is less populated than they'd expect. This means that evidence that civilizations should be more common is actually evidence FOR Yuddism.
Kind of funny that the anthropic argument flips this prediction on its head. I'm probably still getting something subtly wrong here. :)
Maybe, but it's at worst an interesting sort of wrong: https://grabbyaliens.com/
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But I think the Fermi paradox tilts some probabilities on how AI doom would occur.
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