Why do you think so? By default, I think their interaction would run like this: the much more intelligent being will easily persuade/trick the other one to do whatever the first one wants, so they’ll cooperate.
Imagine yourself and a bug. A bug that understands numbers up to one hundred, and is even able to do basic mathematical operations, though in 50% of cases it gets the answer wrong. That’s pretty impressive for a bug… but how much value would a cooperation with this bug provide to you? To compare, how much value would you get by removing such bugs from your house, or by driving your car without caring how many bugs do you kill by doing so.
You don’t have to want to make the bugs suffer. It’s enough if they have zero value for you, and you can gain some value by ignoring their pain. (You could also tell them to leave your house, but maybe they have nowhere else to go, or are just too stupid to find a way out, or they always forget and return.)
Now imagine a being with similar attitude towards humans. Any kind of human thought or work it can do better, and at a lesser cost than communicating with us. It does not hate us, it just can derive some important value by replacing our cities with something else, or by increasing radiation, etc.
(And that’s still assuming a rather benevolent being with values similar to ours. More friendly than a hypothetical Mother-Theresa-bot convinced that the most beautiful gift for a human is that they can participate in suffering.)
Such a scenario is certainly conceivable. On the other hand, bugs do not have general intelligence. So we can only speculate about how interaction between us and much more intelligent aliens would go. By default, I’d say they’d leave us alone. Unless, of course, there’s a hyperspace bypass that needs to be built.
If one being is a thousand times more intelligent than another, such cooperation may be a waste of time.
Why do you think so? By default, I think their interaction would run like this: the much more intelligent being will easily persuade/trick the other one to do whatever the first one wants, so they’ll cooperate.
Imagine yourself and a bug. A bug that understands numbers up to one hundred, and is even able to do basic mathematical operations, though in 50% of cases it gets the answer wrong. That’s pretty impressive for a bug… but how much value would a cooperation with this bug provide to you? To compare, how much value would you get by removing such bugs from your house, or by driving your car without caring how many bugs do you kill by doing so.
You don’t have to want to make the bugs suffer. It’s enough if they have zero value for you, and you can gain some value by ignoring their pain. (You could also tell them to leave your house, but maybe they have nowhere else to go, or are just too stupid to find a way out, or they always forget and return.)
Now imagine a being with similar attitude towards humans. Any kind of human thought or work it can do better, and at a lesser cost than communicating with us. It does not hate us, it just can derive some important value by replacing our cities with something else, or by increasing radiation, etc.
(And that’s still assuming a rather benevolent being with values similar to ours. More friendly than a hypothetical Mother-Theresa-bot convinced that the most beautiful gift for a human is that they can participate in suffering.)
Such a scenario is certainly conceivable. On the other hand, bugs do not have general intelligence. So we can only speculate about how interaction between us and much more intelligent aliens would go. By default, I’d say they’d leave us alone. Unless, of course, there’s a hyperspace bypass that needs to be built.