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timtyler comments on UFAI cannot be the Great Filter - Less Wrong Discussion
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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.
I am confused by this sentence, and cannot parse what it means.
If it knows that its then oldest, then yes it wins. The whole point of Oscar-Cunningham's comment is that it might not know this.
To model it as a simple game, 100 people are all put in separate rooms. One of them is designated as the 'big player', nobody knows who they are including them. Each has two choices expand or hide. If the big player expands then they receive a large pay-off and everyone else gets nothing. If the big player hides, then everyone who hides gets a small pay-off, and everyone who expands gets nothing.
Obviously much depends of the relative size of the large and small pay-offs, but it is not trivially obvious to me that expanding is the optimal strategy here.
Against an equally matched foe, attempts to negotiate are inherently highly risky, if negotiations break down, then one of them may well destroy the other, given the possibility of a first mover advantage, one civilisation may decide to attack if negotiations merely look likely to break down, applying the game theory backwards, we get an extremely volatile situation where as soon as anything ceases to go absolutely perfectly both sides attack. Hiding from an equally matched civilisation may well be much safer than trying to talk to them.
Furthermore, if you become aware of an equally matched civilisation hiding from you, it may be better to continue to pretend you are not aware, rather than opening negotiations straight away. This may go to rather high levels of I know You know I know and as long a mutual knowledge isn't attained both can survive.
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.