"The Dominant Life Form in the Cosmos Is Probably Superintelligent Robots


A handful of astronomers, including Seth Shostak, director of NASA’s Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or SETI, program, NASA Astrobiologist Paul Davies, and Library of Congress Chair in Astrobiology Stephen Dick in espousing the view that the dominant intelligence in the cosmos is probably artificial. In
Susan Schneider paper “Alien Minds," written for a forthcoming NASA publication, Schneider describes why alien life forms are likely to be synthetic, and how such creatures might think.

it could make sense if civilizations out there are 10's of thousands or millions of years ahead of us. Given our trend toward technological advancement in AI, perhaps this is the natural tendency for most intelligent, sentient beings out there..."


I bring this up because of the amazing power IBM Watson has..

#1 We don't know how rare life is, at all. So we don't know if AGI has ever even been created. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox

#2 Watson is impressive but fucking retarded compared to a human. Retarded compared to a bumblebee, to be frank. We are nowhere near creating human-level AGI and don't even know if it's possible on a digital substrate (though the Singularitarian cult suggests otherwise).

#3 More controversial, but I do not think human-made digital computers will ever be as intelligent as humans, as AI researchers continually ignore the phenomenal binding problem. I think the human brain is a quantum computer, and only quantum computers can reach human-level intelligence.

So yes, if there are other civilizations that have developed superintelligent quantum computers, they may be some of the most intelligent beings in the universe. But agian, the Fermi paradox gives huge pause to this idea.

Perhaps if there is life elsewhere, it is what we'd call "artificial" but is really "organic" for the place they exist. In other words, maybe some of the life that naturally evolved elsewhere is silicon-based.

This post was edited by Voyaging on Dec 23 2014 01:49pm

Hmmm.... Not sure what to vote.

If you believe that other life forms exist, and some of those are far more advanced than us (humans); than imo. it only makes sense that if they one day created AI, it might be more dominant than us. But the creators of such AI will be in full control.

As for us, same thing. If one day we did achieve this, I believe we'd remain over powering.

So I get back to the voting.

The poll is about humans and AI, right?
And the post is including other life forms into the mix, right?

So my vote would've been: yes it is possible but humans will remain over powering, modified to --> yes it is possible but the creator(s) will remain over powering.



I do agree.

e - I havn't voted yet, lol. Might just null, cause I dont like voting/lying, if the proper option isn't there. (in my eyes)

This post was edited by James84 on Dec 23 2014 03:11pm

op is begging the question, op is wrong to imply humans are the dominant form of life (even just on earth)

Au contraire my friend.

http://www.amazon.com/Superintelligence-Dangers-Strategies-Nick-Bostrom/dp/0199678111/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1419369945&sr=8-1&keywords=superintelligence

If AI is created that's at the intelligence level of the creators and has the ability to bootstrap its way to increased intelligence, it's a virtual guarantee that the creators would have zero control over it.

Ok. So AI has the ability to increase it's intelligence.
And as for the creators, you dont think they will also be evolving? I mean, I think we're evolving everyday of our lives. Ofc AI, might be able to do this much faster (no guarantee), and you did say; "If ... has the ability to bootstrap". So "if" it doesn't, then theres no reason to think about control.

I stand by my opinion that the creators would still be in full control.

So many "ifs", are used in such opinions, debates. We cannot know as a fact for now.
Therefore, your "Au contraire", which is a french saying, isn't validated, lol. Me being a prick

Biological evolution is several orders of magnitude slower than the improvement of computational hardware. To say we are evolving every day is a wild exaggeration in comparison. Biological evolution takes several generations at the very least, whereas an AI could self-improve the equivalent of ~10 generations in a few years or even much less.

There is almost no way in which an AI wouldn't have the ability to self-improve its intelligence; it's as simple as plugging in additional hardware. If we construct an AI with greater-than-human intelligence, giving it a decisive strategic advantage, how do you suggest we stop it?



If you think this, I expect you have read little to nothing on the topic.

Oh shit. The reapers are coming.... we still got some time, we haven't discovered eezo yet.

I agree, evolution takes time. I am exagerating with my saying, but I do believe we are still evolving everyday, the speed of which may differ from one another.
I needed to be clearer, I presume. What I meant wasn't generalizing humans, I was more of talking in a larger scale. Different entities and so forth, we cannot confirm to their speed of evolution, even as a timely measure.
Reasons are simple; time is relative, I think most ppl believe this to be a fact. Also, not everyone agrees, other life forms with intelligence to exist, therefore we just cannot say their evolution is slower or faster than ours.



The AI speed, you used the word "could" and then the word "If", for the construction of the AI, meaning it's not a certainty.
It all depends on how we create it. Just saying; when AI is created, it will eventually become greater than humans... well I dont think that's right, without the specifications of the creation.

You keep using the words, if we do it like this, or if we do it like that, there will be no way to stop it from being more in time.
I'm saying, what if we dont, and what if we do, but in different ways.
All of which is possible, it just depends.

At the end of it all, if we do go with your route and become minuscule next to the AI's we created... I believe we'll still be able to prevail, if we wanted to.
(I've been known to be quite anal sometimes, sorry)

I think you're really overthinking what I mean by the terms "if" and "could", lol. Yes, I am talking with probabilities, what do you expect, certainty about something that hasn't even happened on Earth yet and we don't know if it's happened elsewhere? I also think considering what extraterrestrial intelligence is like and whether it could create AI is a bit futile since we have no idea what they'd be like. I think the only thing we could (har har) say would be that they would have evolved via Darwinian principles. Whether or not DNA and/or carbon are a requirement for life or are only the way we happened to be, we don't know for sure.

Anyway, I don't see any plausible scenario where if a superintelligent AI were created, we (or some other intelligent race) would be able to thwart it. If you gave me an example of how you think, if a superintelligent AI was created (with, let's say, the utility function of creating as many paperclips as possible), we would be able to prevail, I could clarify why I think this.

This post was edited by Voyaging on Dec 23 2014 09:28pm