Max Tegmark on our place in history: "We're Not Insignificant After All"

Wow: MIT and Berkeley. You guys must have been the group that was right.

There are some actions that seem to be clear wins, like fighting against unFriendly AI. I find it difficult to see what kind of nudge you could prepare that would be effective in an emergency. Can you say more about the kind of thing you had in mind?

Could you define sub-human AI, please?

It seems to me that we already have all manner of sub-human AI. The AIs that deal with telephone traffic, data mining, air-traffic control, the Gov't and Intelligence services, the Military, Universities that have AI programs, Zoos that have breeding programs (and sequence the genomes of endangered animals to find the best mate for the animal), etc.

Are these types of AI far too primitive to even be considered sub-human, in your opinion?

I think just by asking the question "why should I care?", you probably already care more than most, who just go on doing what they always did without a second thought.

If I ask myself "why do I care?", the answer is that I don't seem to care much about the standard status symbols and consumer goods (bigger houses, faster cars, etc.), so what is left? Well for one thing, I care about knowledge, i.e., finding answers to questions that puzzle me, and I think I can do that much better in some futures than in others.

People talk about global poverty and other issues they have little influence over. If people would at least talk about the long-term future of our species that would be a start.

Nope, they haven't thought about it at all, or at least not rationally.

Obligatory: http://xkcd.com/384/

Hmm I hadn't looked at the Drake equation.

It is interesting to note L, the life time of the species or how long you can notice a species. For a dyson sphere blocking the light of a star we would expect it to block for the life time of the star. And if you are making that large you have to make all the other terms a lot smaller than the estimates there.

Or were you thinking of a more realistic equation?

Tim: these civilizations would be superintelligences, they would not behave in a way that is typical of dumb life.

But I agree, I find this argument somewhat weak.

Overlords couldn't devise a pretty clever and powerful algorithm that would have found us already?

Maybe the overlords are very, very, different life forms than us, and so they don't know what to look for other than large scale statistical anomalies?

But I must admit, this is a weakness of the hypothesis.

Apart from this, I'm in agreement with other commenters that a stronger argument is the vastness of space.

More space = more stars = bigger problem. There are roughly 10^14 stars within 100 million light years of earth (as far as I can tell), which would make for 10^17 within 1 bn ly, and 10^20 within 10bn ly. The universe is a whole 13bn years old.

Besides, if you think the aliens can all agree to stop expanding to hide from theoretical simulators then I don't see why some other meme couldn't do the trick too.

I can't think of anything else that would affect every single alien civ out of trillions; in fact, even this explanation seems unlikely to account for no expansion from every single one of trillions of civs.

I think wireheading,

Perhaps we should regard the fermi problem as evidence in favor of wireheading?

religious seclusion

I think that the "religious seclusion" idea is not a good bet. Remember, it has to work with really rather high fidelity.

or some other memetic effect could keep them from expanding

Some other mimetic effect seems more promising.

Couldn't they just be really, really far away

Yes, they could lie beyond our cosmic horizon.

or have a structure and value system such that their bustling activity looks like natural phenomena

No; to see why you need to think about physics, engineering, thermodynamics and information processing. They'd want to capture low entropy sources of energy, and radiate away all that energy as high-entropy infra red radiation. This would be noticeable. Also, it would be an amazing coincidence if alien engineering just happened to look exactly the same as pristine nature.

Kaj, I'm surprised! I think you should update against this explanation; of all the technologies discussed here (superintelligence, Dyson spheres, megascale engineering, nanotech), space colonization is the only one that is so simple that even contemporary humans have a definite recipe for doing it that would probably work. If humans can do it, to a superintelligence it would almost certainly be trivial.

Why does every alien race act the same and try to look invisible? Game theory. They all know that evolution will have produced unacceptable value systems elsewhere in the universe. They all know that they risk losing everything if they come into conflict with a superior hostile power. But a strategy of persistent stealth means that at least a certain amount of value will be achieved. So, they live in the dark matter and they don't advertise their presence by visibly messing with the light matter.

I'm not actually saying this is how it is. But it is a hypothesis (one of many, see below) consistent with all the data we have.

even the high entropy photons that one would normally expect an information processing entity to excrete as waste heat?

Maybe they pipe their waste heat into supermassive black holes.

Regarding the cosmic distribution of dark matter: On my reading there are two levels of structure inferred. There is a dark matter halo around most galaxies, and then there are filamentary networks on the supergalactic scale. The most common view is that it consists of exotic particles, not in the Standard Model, which gravitate but do not radiate. The filaments formed after the big bang due to gravitational clumping, and in turn seeded the formation of the galaxies from light matter.

If you accept that view, then the dark matter is not light matter with all the light being harvested, as I originally suggested. It's just a separate type of matter which doesn't glow in the first place. So if I want to promote the universal stealth hypothesis, perhaps I should deemphasize the role of dark matter and just emphasize the imperative to be invisible, to blend in against the natural cosmic backdrop.

However, our theories about the dark matter are rather tentative, and if you did assume a significant population of galactic and intergalactic civilizations with a common invisibility imperative, I wonder if that would make it plausible that far more of the dark matter is just light matter being kept dark. I don't know the astrophysical reasoning well enough to judge. But there is an issue here which I don't think astrophysicists and cosmologists have ever systematically considered: if large portions of the universe are already artificial, how would that affect our cosmological theories? A lot of cosmology involves elaborate inferences from data like observable atomic abundances. If that data is systematically skewed by biogenic or technogenic influences, then so are the inferences.

And speaking of tentativeness, and of elaborate inferences, all these future scenarios and cosmological theories (and the idea that most of the universe is destined to be converted to computronium is a cosmological theory) are hypotheses built on hypotheses. I think we are in a realm here where it is not rational to pretend to be Bayesian and assign these hypotheses probabilities. I suspect that the most we should say is that we have a list of qualitative hypotheses, each of which are internally consistent and consistent with the data, and then perhaps a list of increasingly dubious lesser hypotheses, which we can affirm to be unlikely for some reason or other. But it's not as if we even know the extent of the hypothesis space. An important aspect of the situation is that our list of "possible and not obviously unlikely" scenarios may grow at any time.

However, not only do people not adhere to this standard of objectivity, I doubt that it would even be advisable to enforce this as a norm, except reactively, after new hypotheses are invented and advocated enthusiastically, or new turns of argument are constructed. Thus, I was criticizing Tegmark and you for saying these things about the future as if you really do know them to be likely, but then I went and said I preferred my own idea about how everyone is hiding in the dark matter. Well, that was psychologically accurate, but I "preferred" it because it gave me more to think about - the stratagems and counter-stratagems of these hypothetical civilizations, and so forth. On purely epistemic grounds, I see no reason to prefer that scenario over the one you were originally advancing, namely, there are no civilizations or intelligences of cosmic extent already existing in the observable universe. The Great Filter might really be that strong; I don't know; it's consistent with everything I do know, so I must regard it as possible.

However, if we had both adhered to the principle of being agnostic on matters we don't actually know about, this exchange might never have occurred, and certain possibilities might never have been explored and critiqued. Then again, maybe agnosticism is so psychologically difficult that one should not worry about asserting it too much; the challenge will always be to assert it enough to rein in some of the false claims of knowledge which abound everywhere.

Returning to the original scenario, one more thought. It has a rather more pessimistic interpretation: that perhaps our past light-cone contains many examples of civilizations which got this far and were then destroyed. On that view, the odds are actually against us.

P.S. by referring to galactic "wilderness" I didn't imply a nature-loving value system. Wilderness simply means, a region not transformed by technology or civilized management. Wilderness zones may exist for reasons other than being nice. Maybe they only care about certain phenomena or possibilities which simply don't exist here. The more dubious aspect of this idea is not that they let us suffer, but rather that they are letting us develop technologically, to the threshold of being a threat to their own purposes.

I agree with most of the points you made in response to Mitchell_Porter, but there's a plausible answer to this:

But why haven't they already taken all of the matter and energy we're made of? Why is the cosmos in a pristine, isotropic, homogeneous state?

Because there are tremendous costs to coming all the way here to take our sun's energy. Any inconvenience we find in the years necessary to travel between the stars is worse for a species achieving superhuman intelligence because it feels longer to them.

I remember a writer on edge.org -- I will find it when I get a chance -- who proposed that a species that reaches a singularity will find a higher return to living in a virtual reality on their home world, where they don't have such communication problems. In that case, they would Dyson-sphere at most their own star, and therefore not interfere with the cosmos's isotropy or homogeny.

Not a clue. One possibility could be that they do not need to take all of the matter and energy we're made of. Maybe they do not yet have that capability.

I'd rather spend my time worrying about other things. It isn't that I don't find the possibility of ET exciting. I just think that they energy needed to contemplate why questions is better of used for other things.