Stupid Questions Open Thread Round 4

lukeprog

This is for anyone in the LessWrong community who has made at least some effort to read the sequences and follow along, but is still confused on some point, and is perhaps feeling a bit embarrassed. Here, newbies and not-so-newbies are free to ask very basic but still relevant questions with the understanding that the answers are probably somewhere in the sequences. Similarly, LessWrong tends to presume a rather high threshold for understanding science and technology. Relevant questions in those areas are welcome as well. Anyone who chooses to respond should respectfully guide the questioner to a helpful resource, and questioners should be appropriately grateful. Good faith should be presumed on both sides, unless and until it is shown to be absent. If a questioner is not sure whether a question is relevant, ask it, and also ask if it's relevant.

Ask away!

Previously: round 1, round 2, round 3

From the original thread:

This is for anyone in the LessWrong community who has made at least some effort to read the sequences and follow along, but is still confused on some point, and is perhaps feeling a bit embarrassed. Here, newbies and not-so-newbies are free to ask very basic but still relevant questions with the understanding that the answers are probably somewhere in the sequences. Similarly, LessWrong tends to presume a rather high threshold for understanding science and technology. Relevant questions in those areas are welcome as well. Anyone who chooses to respond should respectfully guide the questioner to a helpful resource, and questioners should be appropriately grateful. Good faith should be presumed on both sides, unless and until it is shown to be absent. If a questioner is not sure whether a question is relevant, ask it, and also ask if it's relevant.

Ask away!

I've also been doing searches for topics related to the singularity and space travel (this thought came up after playing a bit of Mass Effect ^ _ ^). It would seem to me that biological restrictions on space travel wouldn't apply to a sufficiently advanced AI. This AI could colonize other worlds using near speed of light travel with minimal physical payload and harvest the raw materials on some new planet using algorithms programmed in small harvesting bots. If this is possible then it seem to me that unfriendly AI might not be that much of a threat since they would have many more "habitable" worlds to harvest/live on (like Venus or Mars, comets, asteroids, or extra-solar planets).

Another thing. If this is possible it sort of leads to a paradox: Why hasn't it happened already with other intelligent life on other planets?

It would seem to me that biological restrictions on space travel wouldn't apply to a sufficiently advanced AI. This AI could colonize other worlds using near speed of light travel with minimal physical payload and harvest the raw materials on some new planet using algorithms programmed in small harvesting bots.

Pretty much right.

If this is possible then it seem to me that unfriendly AI might not be that much of a threat since they would have many more "habitable" worlds to harvest/live on (like Venus or Mars, comets, asteroids, or extra-solar

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Stupid Questions Open Thread Round 4

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Stupid Questions Open Thread Round 4

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