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RussellThor comments on The Octopus, the Dolphin and Us: a Great Filter tale - Less Wrong
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Excellent! So, wouldn't that mean that the best way to eliminate x-risk would be to do exactly that?
It is counterintuitive, because "eliminating x-risk" implies some activity, some fixing of something. But we eliminated the risk of devastating asteroid impact not by nuking any dangerous ones, but by mapping all of them and concluding the risk didn't exist. As it happens, that was also much cheaper than any asteroid deflection could have been.
If sending out an interstellar replicator was proof we're further ahead (i.e. less vulnerable) than anything that could have evolved inside this galaxy since the dawn of time, it seems mightily important to become more certain we can do that (without AI). If some variant of our interstellar replicator was capable of enabling intergalactic travel, that'd raise our expectation of comparative invulnerability because we'd know we've gone past obstacles that nothing inside some fraction of our light cone even outside our galaxy has been able to master.
Ideally we'd actually demonstrate that of course, but for the purpose of eliminating (perceived) x-risk, a highly evolved and believable model of how it could be done should go much of the way.
Of course we might find out that self-replicating spacecraft are a lot harder than they look, but that too would be information that is valuable for the long-term survival of our species.
Armstrong and Sandberg claim the feasibility of self-replicating spacecraft has been a settled matter since the Freitag design in 1980. But that paper, while impressively detailed and a great read, glosses over the exact computing abilities such a system would need, does not mention hardening against interstellar radiation, and probably has a bunch of other problems that I'm not qualified to discover. I haven't looked at all the papers that cite it (yet), but the once I've seen seem to agree self-replicating spacecraft are plausible.
I posit that greater certainty on that point would be of outsized value to our species. So why aren't we researching it? Am I overlooking something?
Thanks for the comment. Yes I agree that if we had made such a replicator and set it loose then that would say a lot about the filter. To claim that the filter was still ahead of us in that case you would need to make the more bizarre claim that we would with almost 100% probability seek and destroy the replicators and almost all similar civilizations would do the same, then proceed not to expand again.
I am not sure that a highly believable model would go most of the way because there may be a short window between having a model, then AI issues changing things so it isn't built. It seems pretty believable for the case of mankind that there would be a very short time between building such an thing and going full AI, so to be sure you would actually have to build it and let it loose.
I am not sure why it isn't given much more attention. Perhaps many people don't believe that AI can be part of the filter e.g. the site overcomingbias.com. Also I expect there would be massive moral opposition to letting such a replicator loose from some people! How dare we disturb the whole galaxy in such an unintelligent way. Thats why I mention the simple one that just rearranges small asteroids. It would not wipe out life as we know it but would prove that we were past the filter as such a thing has not been done in our galaxy. I sure would be interested in seeing it researched. Perhaps someone with more kudos can promote it?
Likely a replicator would be a consequence of asteroid mining anyway as the best, cheapest way to get materials from asteroids is if it is all automatic.