What strikes me about our current situation is not only are we at an extremely influential point in the history of the universe, but how few people realize this. It ought to give the few people in the know enormous power (relative to just about anyone else who has existed or will exist) to affect the future, but, even among those who do realize that we're at a bottleneck, few try to shape the future in any substantial way, to nudge it one way or another. Instead, they just go about their "normal" lives, and continue to spend their money on the standard status symbols and consumer goods.
What to make of this? If we follow straight revealed preference, we have to conclude that people have huge discount rates on distance or time, or to put it more straightforwardly, they are simply indifferent about what happens in nearly all of the universe. This is not a very palatable conclusion for those who lean towards preference utilitarianism. Robin's response (in "Dream Time") is to dismiss those preferences as "consequential delusions" and Eliezer's response (in CEV) is to hope that if people were more intelligent and rational they would have more interesting preferences.
Personally, I don't know what I want the future to be, but I still find it worthwhile to try to push it in certain directions, directions that I think are likely to be net improvements. And I also puzzle over why I appear to be in such an atypical position.
It isn't clear what weaker-hypothesis tech self-destruction he thinks likely in the next century.
As paper-clippers would still be visible astronomically can we conclude that UFAI isn't very likely to be what wiped out previous Oases of life that got to our level of advancement? We really have to hypothesize very low chances of getting to human-level life or high non-visible means of stopping human-like things from spreading (nukes, bio terror, etc?).
Anyone have any favoured previous bottlenecks that we are likely to have dodged? None of the transitions life has gone through seems very special apart from the bottleneck of not getting self-replication started at all. I also don't see earth-like planets being more rare than perhaps 1 in 50 million.
Since some people have opined that maybe we're not alone in the universe, I'll write down the strongest argument in that I can think of in favor of this position. (To win, you must fight not only the creature you encounter; you must fight the most horrible thing that can be constructed from its corpse. )
The strongest reason that aliens might be invisible to us is that they are deliberately hiding. In fact I think that this is the only plausible reason.
Why would they be hiding? Well, they might be frightened that they're in a simulation, and that the simul...
Tegmark:
this brief century of ours is arguably the most significant one in the history of our universe: the one when its meaningful future gets decided
There are at least two dubious inputs going into a statement like this. (And I see you making such a statement yourself, on your homepage, Roko!)
The first one is definitely a mistake, but perhaps not a very consequential one. Even if we accept, for the sake of argument, the proposition that the state of the visible universe indicates an absence of spacefaring intelligent life elsewhere, that is not the...
Adding insult to injury, cosmologists have found that we're not even made out of the majority substance.
This line seems contrary to the rest of the paragraph. Not being made of the majority substance makes us more exceptional.
For starters, we're smaller than we thought.
On the contrary. We now know that we are larger than the universe.
Our solar system has 1 sun and 8 "planets". Our galaxy contains about 300 billion stars. There are about 100 billion galaxies in the universe. That's a mere 3x10^22 stars.
A carbon atom has 1 nucleus and 12 electrons. One human cell contains about 100 trillion atoms. One human contains about 100 trillion cells. I myself contain almost as much mass as 3x10^27 carbon atoms.
I'm also older than the universe. The universe is about 14...
A bottleneck is - conventionally - a narrow squeeze-through point with wider areas on either side. It seems challenging to see in what sense is the current era represents that sort of "bottleneck".
On the other hand, the founder effect might be relevant in this context.
Isn't there another possibility about intelligent life not having been noticed?
Could it be that they are leaving us alone because they do not recognize us as useful intelligence, in much the same way that we don't recognize an ant colony as a useful intelligence (even though we know that there is a type of communal intelligence, their structures and presence in the world is just an artifact of what we see as primitive rule-following behavior)?
It might also be the case that they have radically different forms of communication that are not amenable to functi...
An uplifting message as we enter the new year, quoted from Edge.org:
We're Not Insignificant After All
Max Tegmark, Physicist, MIT
When gazing up on a clear night, it's easy to feel insignificant. Since our earliest ancestors admired the stars, our human egos have suffered a series of blows. For starters, we're smaller than we thought. Eratosthenes showed that Earth was larger than millions of humans, and his Hellenic compatriots realized that the solar system was thousands of times larger still. Yet for all its grandeur, our Sun turned out to be merely one rather ordinary star among hundreds of billions in a galaxy that in turn is merely one of billions in our observable universe, the spherical region from which light has had time to reach us during the 14 billion years since our big bang. Then there are probably more (perhaps infinitely many) such regions. Our lives are small temporally as well as spatially: if this 14 billion year cosmic history were scaled to one year, then 100,000 years of human history would be 4 minutes and a 100 year life would be 0.2 seconds. Further deflating our hubris, we've learned that we're not that special either. Darwin taught us that we're animals, Freud taught us that we're irrational, machines now outpower us, and just last month, Deep Fritz outsmarted our Chess champion Vladimir Kramnik. Adding insult to injury, cosmologists have found that we're not even made out of the majority substance.The more I learned about this, the less significant I felt. Yet in recent years, I've suddenly turned more optimistic about our cosmic significance. I've come to believe that advanced evolved life is very rare, yet has huge growth potential, making our place in space and time remarkably significant.
The nature of life and consciousness is of course a hotly debated subject. My guess is that these phenomena can exist much more generally that in the carbon-based examples we know of.
I believe that consciousness is, essentially, the way information feels when being processed. Since matter can be arranged to process information in numerous ways of vastly varying complexity, this implies a rich variety of levels and types of consciousness. The particular type of consciousness that we subjectively know is then a phenomenon that arises in certain highly complex physical systems that input, process, store and output information. Clearly, if atoms can be assembled to make humans, the laws of physics also permit the construction of vastly more advanced forms of sentient life. Yet such advanced beings can probably only come about in a two-step process: first intelligent beings evolve through natural selection, then they choose to pass on the torch of life by building more advanced consciousness that can further improve itself.
Unshackled by the limitations of our human bodies, such advanced life could rise up and eventually inhabit much of our observable universe. Science fiction writers, AI-aficionados and transhumanist thinkers have long explored this idea, and to me the question isn't if it can happen, but if it will happen.
My guess is that evolved life as advanced as ours is very rare. Our universe contains countless other solar systems, many of which are billions of years older than ours. Enrico Fermi pointed out that if advanced civilizations have evolved in many of them, then some have a vast head start on us — so where are they? I don't buy the explanation that they're all choosing to keep a low profile: natural selection operates on all scales, and as soon as one life form adopts expansionism (sending off rogue self-replicating interstellar nanoprobes, say), others can't afford to ignore it. My personal guess is that we're the only life form in our entire observable universe that has advanced to the point of building telescopes, so let's explore that hypothesis. It was the cosmic vastness that made me feel insignificant to start with. Yet those galaxies are visible and beautiful to us — and only us. It is only we who give them any meaning, making our small planet the most significant place in our observable universe.
Moreover, this brief century of ours is arguably the most significant one in the history of our universe: the one when its meaningful future gets decided. We'll have the technology to either self-destruct or to seed our cosmos with life. The situation is so unstable that I doubt that we can dwell at this fork in the road for more than another century. If we end up going the life route rather than the death route, then in a distant future, our cosmos will be teeming with life that all traces back to what we do here and now. I have no idea how we'll be thought of, but I'm sure that we won't be remembered as insignificant.
A few thoughts: when considering the heavy skepticism that the singularity hypothesis receives, it is important to remember that there is a much weaker hypothesis, highlighted here by Tegmark, that still has extremely counter-intuitive implications about our place in spacetime; one might call it the bottleneck hypothesis - the hypothesis that 21st century humanity occupies a pivotal place in the evolution of the universe, simply because we may well be a part of the small space/time window during which it is decided whether earth-originating life will colonize the universe or not.
The bottleneck hypothesis is weaker than the singularity hypothesis - we can be at the bottleneck even if smarter-than-human AI is impossible or extremely impractical, but if smarter-than-human AI is possible and reasonably practical, then we are surely at the bottleneck of the universe. The bottleneck hypothesis is based upon less controversial science than the singularity hypothesis, and is robust to different assumptions about what is feasible in an engineering sense (AI/no AI, ems/no ems, nuclear rockets/generation ships/cryonics advances, etc) so might be accepted by a larger number of people.
Related is Hanson's "Dream Time" idea.