Nothing new here.. it’s just interesting that this idea is starting to become mainstream. We believe weird stuff, everyone does.
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Omniviolence
http://nautil.us blog/omniviolence-is-coming-and-the-world-isnt-ready
“Civilization is an experiment. We may not get the results we’re expecting. So humanity would do well to hope for the best but prepare for the worst.”
TLDR: The basic idea of the article is that it’s becoming increasingly easy for a handful of people to cause violence on a mass scale. They give an example of cheap micro-drones capable of delivering just enough explosive to punch through plate steel.. or someone’s skull. If you combine that with some basic AI they can be programming to hunt and kill people pretty easily. A few people could fill a truck with these and unleash chaos. Governments could quickly be over run if groups starting using this technology. The solutions include mass surveillance.. which is also becoming economical and easy through cheap production of cameras and AI. Or, we could develop a superintelligence to protect us.. from ourselves..
And of course, Nick Bostrom is quoted in this article..
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Aliens among us
TLDR: Big brains have evolved more than once. This is pretty strong evidence that there is most likely big brained aliens outside of our planet as well. Physics seems to lend itself to the development of intelligence.
https://openai.com/blog/emergent-tool-use/
TLDR: Researchers in AI are surprised to find their bots developing cooperative use of tools.
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Aliens in our midst
https://aeon.co/essays/what-the-ctenophore-says-about-the-evolution-of-intelligence
TLDR: The ctenophore developed brains completely differently than every other creature on earth. So, if evolution was “re-run” brains would develop.. but possibly take a different path. Intelligence appears to be an inevitable conclusion of evolution. This also opens the up possibilities as to how aliens also might develop as well.
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Multiple Worlds
https://www.wired.com/story/sean-carroll-thinks-we-all-exist-on-multiple-worlds/
What is reality?
Carroll: The best answer we can give is that reality is a vector in Hilbert space. This is the technical way of saying that reality is described by a single quantum mechanical wave function.
OK, that’s abstract. Please conceptualize this?
We see tables and chairs and people and planets moving through spacetime. Quantum mechanics says that there are no such things as tables and chairs—there’s just something we call a wave function.
Our classical description of the world is a higher level, approximate way of talking about the wave function. The job of physicists and philosophers is to show how, if we live in a world that is just a wave function, then why does it look like there are people and planets and tables and chairs? We don’t have a definite consensus.
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Randonauts
TLDR: A group of people are traveling to completely random places to try and cause “glitches” in the “Matrix” we live in.
It does pose an interesting question: If we are living in a simulation.. can we hack our way out? There was an old Star Trek episode where Captain Picard’s holodeck game “Sherlock” get set at such an extreme difficulty level that Moriarty was smart enough to escape and take over the ship. Fun idea.. but possible? The only way I think it would be possible would be if you could convince a character from the outside to let you out. That’s one of the fears of a contained super-intelligence… humans can’t even make it through the day without being tricked by bogus emails. How long would it take a smart AI to convince them to let it out to “save the world”?
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Meet Sentient
There is lots of doubt about the military’s level of advancement on the project but it’s a good thing to keep in mind just how long the SR-71 was around before anyone knew anything about it. The Government still has the ability to attract talent and many of the technological advances we take advantage of today came via the military (nuclear power for example).
Right it’s purely pattern recognition.. but that is also the basis for human intelligence.
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We are inevitable
“But what about the underlying physical laws – do they favour predictable evolution? At very large scales, it appears so. We know of many laws governing our universe that are certain. Gravity, for example – for which we owe our oceans, thick atmosphere and the nuclear fusion in the sun that showers us with energy – is a predictable force. Isaac Newton’s theories, based on large scale deterministic forces, can also be used to describe many systems on large scales. These describe the universe as perfectly predictable.”
TLDR: The foundational rules of physics will bring humanity into being every time. So, unless there is a universe out there with different physics… Humans, or similar beings, will inevitably come forth.. with every big bang.. assuming there are more then one and that this isn’t a simulation.
If you did make a Universe simulation with our fundamental physics.. intelligent life would pop out. Fun. Would they be considered “AI”?
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Life ≠ alive
https://aeon.co/essays/what-can-schrodingers-cat-say-about-3d-printers-on-mars
Is a self-replicating 3D printer alive?
If we come across aliens that have replaced their biology with metal, plastics, and processors will we claim they aren’t actually life?
What if they’ve replaced their bodies with purely digital manifestations of themselves? Are they “alive”?