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by mojuba
3758 days ago
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> Thought experiment: what if "what comes next" is better than humanity? Better from whose perspective? :) The machines can potentially be more durable, and also scalable. We are fragile, we don't scale very well (though trying hard through globalization). Today we can't even backup/restore a person's mind. In fact I think self-aware intelligent machines will appear sooner than the technology to backup our own biological brains. They will scale their brains, they will expand their "natural habitat" towards other planets, solar systems and even galaxies, like those all-eating self-replicating automatons. Easily. So while we are at it, looking at the grand scale of things, just one question: where are all these machine civilizations in the Universe? Why aren't there any traces of exponentially growing all-consuming machine civilizations anywhere? |
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I'm a fan of the zoo hypothesis. Everything else is just sufficiently "hidden" from observation currently. I mean, if you had a planet full of humans, would you want to talk to them?
The zoo hypothesis seems to breaks down into two underlying reasons for non-contact though: captivity vs. captivating. Either it's a star-trek like "non-interference" thing keeping us isolated for future self-directed development/destruction — or — we are just so frigging boring/hostile/dumb it isn't even interesting to consider engaging us.
(those two reasons do assume intent and purpose on the all-consuming machine civilizations, which we have zero priors for. are there clusters of grey goo out there mindlessly absorbing galaxies as they travel? are there megamind clusters trying to do... something? is this all just a simulation? will the real slim shady please stand up?)