All of Eniac's Comments + Replies

Eniac100

In other words, both the kaboom and the KABOOM must be initiated by Putin and have no upsides for him. That’s two huge hurdles to Armageddon, and I find your probability estimates overly pessimistic.

Eniac31

If Putin uses a nuke in Ukraine, NATO will respond by decimating the Russian invasion force in Ukraine (probably excluding Crimea) with conventional air power. That should be seen as de-escalating, since 1) only a nuclear response can really be an escalation to a nuclear provocation, and 2) Russia’s pre-war border is not violated. It will allow the Ukrainians to take back their land to pre-war boundaries (“Vietnam”). Putin knows this (it’s probably been “explained” to him by Western leaders), so the likelihood he would choose that path is small. Even if he... (read more)

Eniac100

In other words, both the kaboom and the KABOOM must be initiated by Putin and have no upsides for him. That’s two huge hurdles to Armageddon, and I find your probability estimates overly pessimistic.

Eniac00

Good point.

I suppose it boils down to what you include when you say "mind". I think the part of our mind that talks and writes is not very different from the part that thinks. So, if you narrowly, but reasonably, define the "mind" as only the conscious, thinking part of our personality, it might not be so farfetched to think a reasonable reconstruction of it from writings is possible.

Thought and language are closely related. Ask yourself: How many of my thoughts could I put into language, given a good effort? My gut feeling is "most of them", but I could be wrong. The same goes for memories. If a memory can not be expressed, can it even be called a memory?

Eniac10

Yes, making them would be incredibly hard, and because of their relatively short lifetimes, it would be extremely surprising to find any lying around somewhere. Atom sized black holes would be very heavy and not produce much Hawking readiation, as you say. Smaller ones would produce more Hawking radiation, be even harder to feed, and evaporate much faster.

Eniac00

The task you describe, at least the part where no whole brain transplant is involved, can be divided into two parts: 1) extracting the essential information about your mind from your brain, and 2) implanting that same information back into another brain.

Either of these could be achieved in two radically different ways: a) psychologically, i.e. by interview or memoir writing on the extraction side and "brain-washing" on the implanting side, or b) technologically, i.e. by functional MRI, electro-encephalography, etc on the extraction side. It is h... (read more)

1mwengler
I would expect recreating a mind from interviews and memoirs to be about as accurate as building a car based on interviews and memoirs written by someone who had driven cars. which is to say, the part of our mind that talks and writes is not noted for its brilliant and detailed insight into how the vast majority of the mind works.
Eniac30

You might want to check out Centauri Dreams, best blog ever and dedicated to this issue.

Eniac40

Throwing mass into a black hole is harder than it sounds. Conveniently sized black holes that you actually would have a chance at moving around are extremely small, much smaller than atoms, I believe. I think they would just sit there without eating much, despite strenous efforts at feeding them. The cross-section is way too small.

To make matters worse, such holes would emit a lot of Hawking radiation, which would a) interfere with trying to feed them, and b) quickly evaporate them ending in an intense flash of gamma rays.

0DanielLC
The problem is throwing mass into other mass hard enough to make a black hole in the first place. Hawking radiation isn't a big deal. In fact, the problem is making a black hole small enough to get a significant amount of it. An atom-sized black hole has around a tenth of a watt of Hawking radiation. I think it might be possible to get extra energy from it. From what I understand, Hawking radiation is just what doesn't fall back in. If you enclose the black hole, you might be able to absorb some of this energy.
Eniac30

Hah, thanks for pointing this out. I must have read or heard of this before and then forgotten about it, except in my subconscious. Looks like they have done the math, too, and it figures. Cool!

Eniac30

Well, this is not pumping, but it might be much more efficient: As I understand, the polar ice caps are in an equilibrium between snowfall and runoff. If you could somehow wall in a large portion of polar ice, such that it cannot flow away, it might rise to a much higher level and sequester enough water to make a difference in sea levels. A super-large version of a hydroelectric dam, in effect, for ice.

It might also help to have a very high wall around the patch to keep air from circulating, keeping the cold polar air where it is and reduce evaporation/sublimation.

Eniac180

I think you have something there. You could design a complex, but at least metastable orbit for an asteroid sized object that, in each period, would fly by both Earth and, say, Jupiter. Because it is metastable, only very small course corrections would be necessary to keep it going, and it could be arranged such that at every pass Earth gets pushed out just a little bit, and Jupiter pulled in. With the right sized asteroid, it seems feasible that this process could yield the desired results after billions of years.

Eniac20

I don't see how this amounts to central control. At best it is parallel predetermination, but that breaks down because the actions of the AI are determined by the environment, not the utility function alone. Central control implies two-way communication and is impractical when the latency is measured in decades.

Eniac20

so either civilizations are expending to less than 1000 stars on average, or they're not using radio waves, or our guesses about how common they are are wrong

Absent FTL communication, it is hard to imagine a scenario in which any central control remains after civilization has spread to more than a few stars. There would be no stopping the expansion after that, so the first explanation is unlikely.

A civilization whose area of expansion includes our own solar system would be perceivable by many means other than radio, so the second explanation is really not relevant.

That leaves the third as the most likely explanation, I am afraid.

3Stuart_Armstrong
Each expansion part is led by an AI with a shared utility function, and a specified way of resolving negotiations.
Eniac50

My own favorite hypothesis goes like this: Our universe is most likely to be the simplest one that contains me (us, observers, conscious beings, whatever your favorite rendition of the anthropic principle). It is not likely to be much larger than necessary for creating me. The reason it is as large as it is, then, is that that's what it takes. The answer, then, is that something like me exists only once. More would be a waste of universal size and/or complexity, and Occam forbids it.

Is this as crazy as it sounds?

0Fivehundred
Yeah, pretty much. It would be my default assumption, but only if I was completely ignorant about anything beyond the atmosphere. And if we're going to put ourselves in that position, it's not entirely unreasonable to conclude that Marduk grew the world from a weed. If you are referring to complexity, then I think it's almost common sense.
1Gunnar_Zarncke
That doesn't sound crazy at all. I mean at least not to me. At least not at 1 o'clock in the morning. It sounds like the most likely solution given complexity considerations. It is the most likely Tegmark 4 instance with weights inverse to complexity/size as in Solomonoff induction.
Eniac00

I agree. However, considering that Kepler is not actually sensitive enough to detect Earth sized planets in the habitable zone of sun-like stars, both these numbers are extrapolations and it must be assumed that the 7-15% or 20% are well within each other's error bounds.

Eniac00

That is true. However, if "any value could be assigned to Fb", then any value can be made to come out of the Drake equation, except for an upper bound. Updating on Rb can shift around that upper bound, but it tells you nothing about the really small values that decide whether we are alone in the universe or not.

Eniac00

One of the prototypical payoffs that could be had with self-replication that I have seen mentioned is solar farms in the desert that live off sand or rocks and produce arbitrarily large acreage of photovoltaics that can then be used as a replacement for oil. This requires full self-replication, including chemical raw material processing, which is not easy to demonstrate.

I am not sure a good business case could be made for the more limited form of self-replication where the "raw material" is machine parts that only need to be assembled. That would be much easier to demonstrate, so I think a business case for it would be extremely valuable.

Eniac10

Bacteria perform quite well at expanding into an environment, and they are not intelligent.

1[anonymous]
I would argue they are, for some level of micro-intelligence, but that's entirely beside the point. A bacteria doesn't know how to create tools or self-modify or purposefully engineer its environment in such a way as to make things more survivable.
Eniac00

I think this is because Freitas and Drexler and others who might have pursued clanking replicators became concerned with nanotechnology instead. It seems to me that clanking replicators are much easier, because we already have all the tools and components to build them (screwdrivers, electic motors, microchips, etc.). Nanotechnology, while incorporating the same ideas, is far less feasible and may be seen as a red herring that has cost us 30 years of progress in self-replicating machines. Clanking replicators are also much less dangerous, because it is much easier to pull the plug or throw in a wrench when something goes wrong.

Eniac-20

It seems to me that you are making a map-territory confusion here. Existential risks are in the territory.

If I understand the reasoning correctly, it is that we only know the map. We do not know the territory. The territory could be many different kinds, as long as they are consistent with the map. Adding SRS to the map rules out some of the unsafer territories, i.e. reduces our existential risk. It is a Baysian type argument.

Eniac40

This is indeed unexpected. It appears the belief in aliens has been waning instead of waxing as we find out more and more about the universe.

"So what happens if we find all these biologically feasible exoplanets that just don't have any life on them?"

We go forth and put some, of course!

2cameroncowan
How very human of you,
Eniac30

Estimates? Here some quotes from the paper on those "estimates":

"Also Lc, the average longevity of a communicative civilization, cannot be inducted from its short history on Earth and could be anywhere between a few hundred years and billions of years."

"Bayesian analysis demonstrates that as long as Earth remains the only known planet with biotic life, any value could be assigned to Fb"

You tell me how valuable these estimates are, in view of their precision....

0[anonymous]
We may not have good measures for estimating Fb or Lb let alone Lc, but the Kepler mission gives us a pretty good estimate of Rb. You should update your estimate of the closeness of a biotic planet depending on whether your Rb prior was higher or lower than the result.
-3Shmi
I doubt Einstein actually said that, but I can't agree more.