Here’s an interesting problem: why do we live in this era? Imagine the people that lived before we migrated out of Africa; when the human population was less than 10,000. What were the odds of being one of those people? At least less than winning the lottery. So we can conclude that the likelihood of existing in a specific era is proportional to the amount of consciousness in existence during that time period.
This presents a major problem for a technological singularity as the odds of living before the singularity turned all matter in the universe into consciousness are virtually nil. So there will be no singularity, and it’s almost frightening to imagine what we can conclude from this for our future.
This argument is called the Doomsday Argument. It has been discussed several times around these parts (e.g. here)
In a technical sense, the issue resolves around how you think self-sampling should be understood. You might consider looking up the “Sleeping Beauty” problem for more discussion of that point.
In a non-technical sense, there’s what might be called the “reference-class problem.” On the one hand, the number of people in existence has constantly been increasing over time. On the other, the number of interconnected civilizations seems to be dropping (after the widespread adoption of the internet, one could argue that the number of distinct civilizations currently in existence can be counted on one’s fingers and toes). Figuring out the correct reference class has profound effects on the conclusions one reaches using this kind of reasoning.
Here’s an interesting problem: why do we live in this era? Imagine the people that lived before we migrated out of Africa; when the human population was less than 10,000. What were the odds of being one of those people? At least less than winning the lottery. So we can conclude that the likelihood of existing in a specific era is proportional to the amount of consciousness in existence during that time period.
This presents a major problem for a technological singularity as the odds of living before the singularity turned all matter in the universe into consciousness are virtually nil. So there will be no singularity, and it’s almost frightening to imagine what we can conclude from this for our future.
This argument is called the Doomsday Argument. It has been discussed several times around these parts (e.g. here)
In a technical sense, the issue resolves around how you think self-sampling should be understood. You might consider looking up the “Sleeping Beauty” problem for more discussion of that point.
In a non-technical sense, there’s what might be called the “reference-class problem.” On the one hand, the number of people in existence has constantly been increasing over time. On the other, the number of interconnected civilizations seems to be dropping (after the widespread adoption of the internet, one could argue that the number of distinct civilizations currently in existence can be counted on one’s fingers and toes). Figuring out the correct reference class has profound effects on the conclusions one reaches using this kind of reasoning.
Yeah, I knew I couldn’t have been the only one to have thought of this.