About a year ago, I made a bet—my $50,000 against their $1000 - that we wouldn’t see slam-dunk evidence of UFOs/UAPs being the result of aliens, the supernatural, simulations, or anything similarly non-mundane.
What’s changed 1 year on? Well, I think a year ago UAPs and aliens were more in the news, between governmental hearings in several countries, a whistleblower ex-USAF intelligence official, and continuing coverage of navy UAP tapes. None of that has led anywhere, and it’s mostly fading from public memory.
You can find people currently claiming that the big reveal that breaks it all wide open is just around the corner. But you can basically always find people claiming that. While doing some quick searching before making this comment, though, I did find out that a congressman from Tennessee is a big believer that the extraordinarily fake-looking aliens exhibited in Mexico last year are super important and need to be investigated at U Tennessee.
If they were, and they turned out to have non-terrestrial biological structure, that’s definitely a way I could pay the money. I estimate the probability of this at about 0.00000000000000001.
It’s feasible to establish AGI-run governance that does nothing on its own other than permanently and irrevocably but unobtrusively restrict the level of technological development of every civilization it reaches, including its own builders (perhaps as a way of opposing extinction risk). This leads to strange ancient cultures of biological low-tech aliens that slowly travel the galaxy, much later than the initial wave of von Neumann probes of the technological development restricting AGI.
This is still unlikely, as the outcome both wastes the cosmic endowment and requires sufficient technical sophistication to make it stable and irrevocable. So the builders of this AGI governance both need to decently understand alignment and target an outcome that radically impairs their future. But this seems only Fermi paradox unlikely, not literal magic unlikely. The fraudulent nature of “evidence” we see reduces the probability that this is the case further, as low-tech aliens could instead be making themselves known in straightforward ways, while the high-tech AGI that restricts tech doesn’t need to be observable at all. But this doesn’t go all the way to impossibility, as an ancient low-tech culture could have traditions and bureaucracy cashing out in a bizarre first contact process.
The prediction of this hypothesis is that we don’t get to develop unrestricted ASI of our own. Given the inscrutable nature of the models (or equivalently lack of technical sophistication needed to know what we are doing) any interventions don’t yet need to be humanly observable.
About a year ago, I made a bet—my $50,000 against their $1000 - that we wouldn’t see slam-dunk evidence of UFOs/UAPs being the result of aliens, the supernatural, simulations, or anything similarly non-mundane.
What’s changed 1 year on? Well, I think a year ago UAPs and aliens were more in the news, between governmental hearings in several countries, a whistleblower ex-USAF intelligence official, and continuing coverage of navy UAP tapes. None of that has led anywhere, and it’s mostly fading from public memory.
You can find people currently claiming that the big reveal that breaks it all wide open is just around the corner. But you can basically always find people claiming that. While doing some quick searching before making this comment, though, I did find out that a congressman from Tennessee is a big believer that the extraordinarily fake-looking aliens exhibited in Mexico last year are super important and need to be investigated at U Tennessee.
If they were, and they turned out to have non-terrestrial biological structure, that’s definitely a way I could pay the money. I estimate the probability of this at about 0.00000000000000001.
It’s feasible to establish AGI-run governance that does nothing on its own other than permanently and irrevocably but unobtrusively restrict the level of technological development of every civilization it reaches, including its own builders (perhaps as a way of opposing extinction risk). This leads to strange ancient cultures of biological low-tech aliens that slowly travel the galaxy, much later than the initial wave of von Neumann probes of the technological development restricting AGI.
This is still unlikely, as the outcome both wastes the cosmic endowment and requires sufficient technical sophistication to make it stable and irrevocable. So the builders of this AGI governance both need to decently understand alignment and target an outcome that radically impairs their future. But this seems only Fermi paradox unlikely, not literal magic unlikely. The fraudulent nature of “evidence” we see reduces the probability that this is the case further, as low-tech aliens could instead be making themselves known in straightforward ways, while the high-tech AGI that restricts tech doesn’t need to be observable at all. But this doesn’t go all the way to impossibility, as an ancient low-tech culture could have traditions and bureaucracy cashing out in a bizarre first contact process.
The prediction of this hypothesis is that we don’t get to develop unrestricted ASI of our own. Given the inscrutable nature of the models (or equivalently lack of technical sophistication needed to know what we are doing) any interventions don’t yet need to be humanly observable.