[fpgaminer]

I think this is a bit like us diving into the ocean to observe algae. We don't do it because we're concerned about its imminent sentience and potential to "cause trouble". We just do it because we're curious; we want a better understanding of our world and universe.

We're likely to be approximately several tens of thousands orders of magnitude below the advancement of any supposed "visitors". Us being a threat is unlikely to be even a single virtual particle of thought in their intragalactic quantum brains.

[joombaga]

> We're likely to be approximately several tens of thousands orders of magnitude below the advancement of any supposed "visitors".

What's feeding your intuition here? I wouldnt have thought they'd likely be _that_ advanced. But I'm not sure where tens of thousands of orders of magnitude puts them on e.g. the Kardashev scale, and I'm sure being a huge Star Trek fan has affected my own intuitions :)

[fpgaminer]

I love Star Trek, and that being a possible future is nice to entertain, but doesn't take into account an AI singularity. The latter, to some approximation, seems more likely to me. And that puts a Moore's law on intelligence. Not just for us, but for any potential space faring race. And it doesn't have to be just "AI"; as soon as a race has the capability to recursively improve their own intelligence they'll hit that exponential curve too.

So by the time a race gets space faring and solves FTL travel, it's likely they're at least a good step onto that exponential intelligence curve. Hence a vague estimate of "tens of thousands of orders of magnitude".

For example, as is we should be capable of building a GPT-human within 20 years (1). About the same time frame that, if we put all our effort into it, it would take for us to barely colonize another planet in our solar system. Given another 20 years and we've got an AI that's 1000x more intelligent than us.

I see our trajectory as hitting that exponential curve before we even get out of this solar system. So I just imagine any potential "visitors" to our planet are much further along.

(1) This is calculated using Moore's law: how many doubles of compute will it take before GPT-3 can be naively scaled to the estimated number of parameters of a human brain. That doesn't necessarily imply human level intelligence, but our studies so far indicate that there's strong reason to believe that GPT-human will be something approximating 1000x smarter than GPT-3. Human or not, that's terrifyingly intelligent. Remember that Transformer like architectures are the ones that "solved" protein folding last year. And none of this calculation takes into account the potential for continued improvements to architectures and efficiency over that time span. So while I don't think GPT-human will start an AI apocalypse in 20 years, I do think GPT-human will be better than every other human on this planet at doing ... AI research. And that's where the spark of singularity begins.

[scj]

A species on a planet with low gravity or the ability to hibernate might have a different tech tree than humanity.

That being said, my bet is on the side that most species send AI to different solar systems before biological ones arrive.

[jolincost]

These are some nice timeframe predictions, seems more up to date than Kurzweil