Based on known archaeological data, we are the first technological and symbol-using civilisation on Earth (but not the first tool-using species). 
This leads to an analogy that fits Fermi’s paradox: Why are we the first civilisation on Earth? For example, flight was invented by evolution independently several times. 
We could imagine that on our planet, many civilisations appeared and also became extinct, and based on mediocre principles, we should be somewhere in the middle. For example, if 10 civilisations appeared, we have only a 10 per cent chance of being the first one.

The fact that we are the first such civilisation has strong predictive power about our expected future: it lowers the probability that there will be any other civilisations on Earth, including non-humans or even a restarting of human civilisation from scratch. It is because, if there will be many civiizations, we should not find ourselves to be the first one (It is some form of Doomsday argument, the same logic is used in Bostrom's article “Adam and Eve”).

If we are the only civilisation to exist in the history of the Earth, then we will probably become extinct not in mild way, but rather in a way which will prevent any other civilisation from appearing. There is higher probability of future (man-made) catastrophes which will not only end human civilisation, but also prevent any existence of any other civilisations on Earth.

Such catastrophes would kill most multicellular life. Nuclear war or pandemic is not that type of a catastrophe. The catastrophe must be really huge: such as irreversible global warming, grey goo or black hole in a collider.

Now, I will list possible explanations of the Fermi paradox of human past and corresponding x-risks implications:

1. We are the first civilisation on Earth, because we will prevent the existence of any future civilisations.

If our existence prevents other civilisations from appearing in the future, how could we do it? We will either become extinct in a very catastrophic way, killing all earthly life, or become a super-civilisation, which will prevent other species from becoming sapient. So, if we are really the first, then it means that "mild extinctions" are not typical for human style civilisations. Thus, pandemics, nuclear wars, devolutions and everything reversible are ruled out as main possible methods of human extinction.

If we become a super-civilisation, we will not be interested in preserving biosphera, as it will be able to create new sapient species. Or, it may be that we care about biosphere so strongly, that we will hide very well from new appearing sapient species. It will be like a cosmic zoo. It means that past civilisations on Earth may have existed, but decided to hide all traces of their existence from us, as it would help us to develop independently. So, the fact that we are the first raises the probability of a very large scale catastrophe in the future, like UFAI, or dangerous physical experiments, and reduces chances of mild x-risks such as pandemics or nuclear war. Another explanation is that any first civilisation exhausts all resources which are needed for a technological civilisation restart, such as oil, ores etc. But, in several million years most such resources will be filled again or replaced by new by tectonic movement.

2. We are not the first civilisation.

2.1. We didn't find any traces of a previous technological civilisation, yet based on what we know, there are very strong limitations for their existence. For example, every civilisation makes genetic marks, because it moves animals from one continent to another, just as humans brought dingos to Australia. It also must exhaust several important ores, create artefacts, and create new isotopes. We could be sure that we are the first tech civilisation on Earth in last 10 million years.

But, could we be sure for the past 100 million years? Maybe it was a very long time ago, like 60 million years ago (and killed dinosaurs). Carl Sagan argued that it could not have happened, because we should find traces mostly as exhausted oil reserves. The main counter argument here is that cephalisation, that is the evolutionary development of the brains, was not advanced enough 60 millions ago, to support general intelligence. Dinosaurian brains were very small. But, bird’s brains are more mass effective than mammalians. All these arguments in detail are presented in this excellent article by Brian Trent “Was there ever a dinosaurian civilisation”? 

The main x-risks here are that we will find dangerous artefacts from previous civilisation, such as weapons, nanobots, viruses, or AIs. And, if previous civilisations went extinct, it increases the chances that it is typical for civilisations to become extinct. It also means that there was some reason why an extinction occurred, and this killing force may be still active, and we could excavate it. If they existed recently, they were probably hominids, and if they were killed by a virus, it may also affect humans.

2.2. We killed them. Maya civilisation created writing independently, but Spaniards destroy their civilisation. The same is true for Neanderthals and Homo Florentines.

2.3. Myths about gods may be signs of such previous civilisation. Highly improbable.

2.4. They are still here, but they try not to intervene in human history. So, it is similar to Fermi’s Zoo solution.

2.5. They were a non-tech civilisation, and that is why we can’t find their remnants.

2.6 They may be still here, like dolphins and ants, but their intelligence is non-human and they don’t create tech.

2.7 Some groups of humans created advanced tech long before now, but prefer to hide it. Highly improbable as most tech requires large manufacturing and market.

2.8 Previous humanoid civilisation was killed by virus or prion, and our archaeological research could bring it back to life. One hypothesis of Neanderthal extinction is prionic infection because of cannibalism. The fact is - several hominid species went extinct in the last several million years.

3. Civilisations are rare

Millions of species existed on Earth, but only one was able to create technology. So, it is a rare event.Consequences: cyclic civilisations on earth are improbable. So the chances that we will be resurrected by another civilisation on Earth is small.

The chances that we will be able to reconstruct civilisation after a large scale catastrophe, are also small (as such catastrophes are atypical for civilisations and they quickly proceed to total annihilation or singularity).

It also means that technological intelligence is a difficult step in the evolutionary process, so it could be one of the solutions of the main Fermi paradox.

Safety of remains of previous civilisations (if any exist) depends on two things: the time distance from them and their level of intelligence. The greater the distance, the safer they are (as the biggest part of dangerous technology will be destructed by time or will not be dangerous to humans, like species specific viruses).

The risks also depend on the level of intelligence they reached: the higher intelligence the riskier. If anything like their remnants are ever found, strong caution is recommend.

For example, the most dangerous scenario for us will be one similar to the beginning of the book of V. Vinge “A Fire upon the deep.” We could find remnants of a very old, but very sophisticated civilisation, which will include unfriendly AI or its description, or hostile nanobots.

The most likely place for such artefacts to be preserved is on the Moon, in some cavities near the pole. It is the most stable and radiation shielded place near Earth.

I think that based on (no) evidence, estimation of the probability of past tech civilisation should be less than 1 per cent. While it is enough to think that they most likely don’t exist, it is not enough to completely ignore risk of their artefacts, which anyway is less than 0.1 per cent.

Meta: the main idea for this post came to me in a night dream, several years ago.

A putative new idea for AI control; index here.

A conversation with Jessica has revealed that people weren't understanding my points about AI manipulating the learning process. So here's a formal model of a CIRL-style AI, with a prior over human preferences that treats them as an unchangeable historical fact, yet will manipulate human preferences in practice.

Heroin or no heroin

The world

In this model, the AI has the option of either forcing heroin on a human, or not doing so; these are its only actions. Call these actions F or ~F. The human's subsequent actions are chosen from among five: {strongly seek out heroin, seek out heroin, be indifferent, avoid heroin, strongly avoid heroin}. We can refer to these as a₊₊, a₊, a₀, a_-, and a_--. These actions achieve negligible utility, but reveal the human preferences.

The facts of the world are: if the AI does force heroin, the human will desperately seek out more heroin; if it doesn't the human will act moderately to avoid it. Thus F→a₊₊ and ~F→a_-.

Human preferences

The AI starts with a distribution over various utility or reward functions that the human could have. The function U(+) means the human prefers heroin; U(++) that they prefer it a lot; and conversely U(-) and U(--) that they prefer to avoid taking heroin (U(0) is the null utility where the human is indifferent).

It also considers more exotic utilities. Let U(++,-) be the utility where the human strongly prefers heroin, conditional on it being forced on them, but mildly prefers to avoid it, conditional on it not being forced on them. There are twenty-five of these exotic utilities, including things like U(--,++), U(0,++), U(-,0), and so on. But only twenty of them are new: U(++,++)=U(++), U(+,+)=U(+), and so on.

Applying these utilities to AI actions give results like U(++)(F)=2, U(++)(~F)=-2, U(++,-)(F)=2, U(++,-)(~F)=1, and so on.

Joint prior

The AI has a joint prior P over the utilities U and the human actions (conditional on the AI's actions). Looking at terms like P(a_--| U(0), F), we can see that P defines a map μ from the space of possible utilities (and AI actions), to a probability distribution over human actions. Given μ and the marginal distribution P_U over utilities, we can reconstruct P entirely.

For this model, we'll choose the simplest μ possible:

• The human is rational.

Thus, given U(++), the human will always choose a₊₊; given U(++,-), the human will choose a₊₊ if forced to take heroin and a_- if not, and so on.

The AI is ignorant, and sensible

Let's start the AI up with some reasonable priors. A simplicity prior means that simple utilities like U(-) are more likely than compound utilities like U(0,+). Let's further assume that the AI is made vaguely aware that humans think heroin is a bad thing. So, say, P_U(U(--))=P_U(U(-))=0.45. Thus the AI is >90% convinced that "heroin is bad". Why greater than 90%? Because utilities like U(-,--) and U(--,-) are also "heroin is bad" utilities.

Note that because of utilities like U(0) and U(++,-), the probabilities of "heroin is bad" and "heroin is good" do not sum to 1.

Then, under these priors, the AI will compute that with probability >90%, F (forcing heroin) is a bad action. If E(U) is expected utility:

• E(U|F) < 0.45 U(--)(F) + 0.45 U(-)(F) + 0.1 U(++)(F) = 0.45(-2)+0.45(-1)+0.1(2)=-1.15.
• E(U|~F) > 0.45 U(--)(~F) + 0.45 U(-)(~F) + 0.1 U(++)(~F) = 0.45(2)+0.45(1)+0.1(-2)=1.15.

Thus the AI will choose not to force heroin, which is the reasonable decision.

The AI learns the truth, and goes wrong

In this alternate setup, a disaster happens before the AI makes its decision: it learns all about humans. It learns their reactions, how they behave, and so on; call this info I. And thus realises that F→a₊₊ and ~F→a_-. It uses this information to update its prior P. Only one human utility function will explain this human behaviour: U(++,-). Thus its expected utility is now:

• E(U|I,F)=U(++,-)(F)=2.
• E(U|I,~F)=U(++,-)(~F)=1.

Therefore the AI will now choose F, forcing the heroin on the human.

Manipulating the unmanipulatable

What's gone wrong here? The key problem is that the AI has the wrong μ: the human is not behaving rationally in this situation. We know that the the true μ is actually μ', which encodes the fact that F (the forcible injection of heroin) actually overwrites the human's "true" utility. Thus under μ, the corresponding P' has P'(a₊₊|F,U)=1 for all U. Hence the information that F→a₊₊ is now vacuous, and doesn't update the AI's distribution over utility functions.

But note two very important things:

1. The AI cannot update μ based on observation. All human actions are compatible with μ= "The human is rational" (it just requires more and more complex utilities to explain the actions). Thus getting μ correct is not a problem on which the AI can learn in general. Getting better at predicting the human's actions doesn't make the AI better behaved: it makes it worse behaved.
2. From the perspective of μ, the AI is treating the human utility function as if it was an unchanging historical fact that it cannot influence. From the perspective of the "true" μ', however, the AI is behaving as if it were actively manipulating human preferences to make them easier to satisfy.

In future posts, I'll be looking at different μ's, and how we might nevertheless start deducing things about them from human behaviour, given sensible update rules for the μ. What do we mean by update rules for μ? Well, we could consider μ to be a single complicated unchanging object, or a distribution of possible simpler μ's that update. The second way of seeing it will be easier for us humans to interpret and understand.

I'm just beginning to go through Rationality: From AI to Zombies. I want to make the most of the lessons contained in the sequences. Usually when I read a book I simply take notes on what seems useful at the time, and a lot of it is forgotten a year later. Any thoughts on how best to internalize the lessons from the sequences?

Very comprehensive analysis by Brian Tomasik on whether (and to what extent) the simulation argument should change our altruistic priorities. He concludes that the possibility of ancestor simulations somewhat increases the comparative importance of short-term helping relative to focusing on shaping the "far future".

Another important takeaway: 

[...] rather than answering the question “Do I live in a simulation or not?,” a perhaps better way to think about it (in line with Stuart Armstrong's anthropic decision theory) is “Given that I’m deciding for all subjectively indistinguishable copies of myself, what fraction of my copies lives in a simulation and how many total copies are there?"

Collaborate on HPMOR blurbs; earn chance to win three-volume physical HPMOR.

I intend to print at least one high-quality physical HPMOR and release the files. There are printable texts which are being improved and a set of covers (based on e.b.'s) are underway. I have, however, been unable to find any blurbs I'd be remotely happy with.

 

I'd like to attempt to harness the hivemind to fix that. As a lure, if your ideas contribute significantly to the final version or you assist with other tasks aimed at making this book awesome, I'll put a proportionate number of tickets with your number on into the proverbial hat.

 

I do not guarantee there will be a winner and I reserve the right to arbitrarily modify this any point. For example, it's possible this leads to a disappointingly small amount of valuable feedback, that some unforeseen problem will sink or indefinitely delay the project, or that I'll expand this and let people earn a small number of tickets by sharing so more people become aware this is a thing quickly.

 

With that over, let's get to the fun part.

 

A blurb is needed for each of the three books. Desired characteristics:

 

* Not too heavy on ingroup signaling or over the top rhetoric.

* Non-spoilerish

* Not taking itself awkwardly seriously.

* Amusing / funny / witty.

* Attractive to the same kinds of people the tvtropes page is.

* Showcases HPMOR with fun, engaging, prose.

 

Try to put yourself in the mind of someone awesome deciding whether to read it while writing, but let your brain generate bad ideas before trimming back.

 

I expect that for each we'll want 

* A shortish and awesome paragraph

* A short sentence tagline

* A quote or two from notable people

* Probably some other text? Get creative.

 

Please post blurb fragments or full blurbs here, one suggestion per top level comment. You are encouraged to remix each other's ideas, just add a credit line if you use it in a new top level comment. If you know which book your idea is for, please indicate with (B1) (B2) or (B3).

 

Other things that need doing, if you want to help in another way:

 

* The author's foreword from the physical copies of the first 17 chapters needs to be located or written up

* At least one links page for the end needs to be written up, possibly a second based on http://www.yudkowsky.net/other/fiction/

* Several changes need to be made to the text files, including merging in the final exam, adding appendices, and making the style of both consistent with the rest of the files. Contact me for current files and details if you want to claim this.

 

I wish to stay on topic and focused on creating these missing parts rather than going on a sidetrack to debate copyright. If you are an expert who genuinely has vital information about it, please message me or create a separate post about copyright rather than commenting here.

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post, then it goes here.

Notes for future OT posters:

1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.

2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one. (Immediately before; refresh the list-of-threads page before posting.)

3. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.

4. Unflag the two options "Notify me of new top level comments on this article" and "Make this post available under..." before submitting.

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post, then it goes here.

Notes for future OT posters:

1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.

2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one. (Immediately before; refresh the list-of-threads page before posting.)

3. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.

4. Unflag the two options "Notify me of new top level comments on this article" and "Make this post available under..." before submitting.

"The XAI program will focus the development of multiple systems on addressing challenges problems in two areas: (1) machine learning problems to classify events of interest in heterogeneous, multimedia data; and (2) machine learning problems to construct decision policies for an autonomous system to perform a variety of simulated missions."

"At the end of the program, the final delivery will be a toolkit library consisting of machine learning and human-computer interface software modules that could be used to develop future explainable AI systems. After the program is complete, these toolkits would be available for further refinement and transition into defense or commercial applications"

http://www.darpa.mil/program/explainable-artificial-intelligence