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Oscar_Cunningham comments on UFAI cannot be the Great Filter - Less Wrong Discussion
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For galactic civilisations I'd guess that there would be a strong first mover advantage. If one civilisation (perhaps controlled be an AI) started expanding 1000 years before another then any conflict between them would likely be won by the civilisation that started capturing resources first.
But what if none of them know which of them expanded first? There might be several forces colonising the galaxy, and all keeping extremely quiet so that they don't get noticed and destroyed by and older civilisation. Thus no need for a great filter, and even if UFAI were common we wouldn't observe it colonising the galaxy.
The same way different species hid from each other to avoid being wiped out? You can't expand and hide. And you must expand - so you can't realistically hide.
The fairly obvious distinction is the species do not have centralling planning, or even sophisticated communication between individual members. Civilisations can and do have such things, and AIs also seem likely to.
Civiliszations could hide - if they were stupid - or if they didn't care about the future. I wasn't suggesting hiding was a strategy that was not available at all - just that it would not be an effective survival strategy.
That may be the case, but the fact that species did not hide is no evidence for it, as species could not realistically have hid even if it would have been optimal
Also, I would like to point out that where the hiding strategy is feasible, on the individual level, it is very common among animals.
In fact, arguably we do have a few cases of species 'hiding', such as the coelocanth, which has gone over a hundred million years without much significant evolution, vastly longer than most species survive.
Basically, I do not see any reason to believe either of the following assertions.
Perhaps I overstated my case. Hiding and expanding are different optimisation targets that pull in pretty different directions. It is challenging to expand while hiding effectively - since farming suns tends to leave a visible thermodynamic signature which is visible from far away and is expensive to eliminate. I expect civilizations will typically strongly prioritize expanding over hiding.
Okay, in that case I now agree with the first part of your claim, I will accept that there is certainly a trade-off, perfect expanding does not involve much hiding and perfect hiding does not involve much expanding.
So, to move on to the other side, why do you expect expanding to be more prevalent than hiding. It seems to me that Oscar Cunningham's argument for why hiding might be preferable is quite convincing, or at any rate reduces it to a non-trivial problem of game theory and risk aversion.
Camouflage is pretty unlikely to be an effective defense against an oncoming colonisation wave. I figure the defense budget will be spent more on growth and weapons than camouflage.
For reasons of technological progress, I suspect a hiding civilisation could destroy an younger expanding civilisation before it was hit by the colonisation wave. If this is the case, it becomes a matter of how likely you are to be the oldest civilisation, how likely the oldest civilisation is to expand or hide, and how much you value survival relative to growth. If the first is low and the last is high, then hiding seems like quite a good strategy.
That sounds like the wave's leading edge to me.
The issues as I see them are different. Much depends on whether progress "maxes out". If it doesn't the most mature civilization probaby just wins - in which case, hiding is irrelevant. If the adversaries are well matched they may attempt to find some other resolution besides a big fight which could weaken both of them. Again, hiding won't help.
IMO, assuming the oldest civilization is in hiding is not a good way to start analysing this issue.
Obligatory "extraterrestrial superintelligence has put a planetarium-like illusion around the Earth that appears and behaves exactly like real spacetime would in the absence of extraterrestrials."
That's quite a different situation from the one in the context, which was:
Yes, I did not link to that to either refute or support your point, it was merely mentioning an interesting article on the "civilizations in hiding" tangent. For the public good, you know.
This requires either:
It seems much likelier that we are alone in the galaxy. Either civilizations are pretty rare or we are the oldest one. If the latter is true this seems anthropic evidence in favour of the simulation hypothesis.
Your argument works much better on a much larger scale, for example it does take millions of years for light to travel between galaxies.
~110 or ~200 million year head start on intelligent civilization building life on a Earth like planet still doesn't seem obviously unlikely.
This is almost certainly true, but at these scales the speed limit of the universe is a potent ally. By the time anyone notices you are doing anything many hundreds of millions of years of you already doing whatever you wanted to do with the local matter have passed.
Also see metric expansion of space. The farther away an object is, the faster it recedes from us.
Or it could be anthropic evidence that the first mover advantage is so large that the first civilization to expand prevents all others from even developing.