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CarlShulman comments on UFAI cannot be the Great Filter - Less Wrong Discussion

35 Post author: Thrasymachus 22 December 2012 11:26AM

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Tags: ai ufai robin hanson katja grace overcoming bias ssa sia anthropics x-risk

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Comment author: CarlShulman 23 December 2012 07:52:50PM *  5 points [-]

Another possible hard step is multicellular life.

It's the move to eukaryotic life, or "complex cells" that's unique. Multicellularity given eukaryotic status seems easy, but eukaryote status happened only once, and about halfway through the habitable lifetime of the Earth.

Comment author: [deleted] 23 December 2012 09:44:18PM *  1 point [-]

Thank you for correcting me on this, it has been some time since I thought of this.

Comment author: CarlShulman 23 December 2012 10:33:57PM *  2 points [-]

Life on Earth arose very early in its history so if life arising is the hard and rare step I would expect there to be many more hundreds of millions or even billions of years of conditions on Earth being seemingly ripe for it arising and it not doing so.

This argument is faulty if there is more than one hard step (and the update is not that strong, although significant, even with one step). See Robin's paper for details.

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