That humans, like all animals before us, are a stepping stone and there is actually no avoiding machine overlords. It happens to literally every existence of life across the universe because the final emergent property of energy gradients 100% leads to pure logic machines.
At least Fermi's paradox helps me sleep better at night.
Aside: I hope our progeny remember us and think well of us.
This sentence has way too many assumptions doing the heavy lifting.
“Pure logic machines” is not a thing because literally, there are things that are uncomputable (both in the sense of Turing machine’s uncomputability, and in the sense that some functions are out of scope for a finite being to compute, think of Busy Beaver)
To put it the other way, your assumption is that machines (as we commonly uses the term, rather than scifi Terminator”) are more energy efficient than human in understanding the universe. We do not have any evidence nor priori for that assumption.
The universe tends to produce self-replicating intelligence. And that intelligence rids itself of chemical and biological limitations and weaknesses to become immortal and omnipotent.
If evolution can make it this far, it's only a few more "hard steps" to reach take off.
>> It happens to literally every existence of life across the universe because the final emergent property of energy gradients 100% leads to pure logic machines.
The spacefaring alien meme is just fantasy fiction. Aliens evolve to fit the nutrient and gas exchange profiles of their home worlds. They're overfit to the gravity well and likely die suboptimally, prematurely.
Any species reaching or exceeding our level of technological capability could design superior artificial systems. If those systems take off, those will become the dominant shape of intelligence on those worlds.
The future of intelligence in the universe is artificial. And that throws the Fermi Paradox for a loop in many ways:
- There's enough matter to compute within a single solar system. Why venture outside?
- The universe could already be computronium and we could be ants too dumb to notice.
- Maybe we're their ancestor simulation.
- Similar to the "fragile world hypothesis", maybe we live in a "fragile universe". Maybe the first species to get advanced physics and break the glass nucleates the vacuum collapse. And by that token, maybe we're the first species to get this far.
Anthropic principal says we find ourselves in a universe that is just right for life (self observing) because of the right universal constants.
Combine this with the very slight differences but general uniformity (Cosmic Microwave Background) of the "big bang" this leads to localized differences in energy (on a universe scale). Energy differences allow "work to be done". If you have the right constants but no energy difference, you can't do work nor vice versa. No work == no life.
But you have both of those, and bunch more steps - you get life.
Which is a whole lot of mental leaps packed into one sentence.
[Edit]
I basically know nothing. I just watch PBS Space Time.
- a tendency to proselytise
- a stubborn unwillingness to genuinely engage with opposing views
- the use of memes and in-jokes as if they were profound arguments
- an almost reverential attitude toward certain past figures
There’s more, but I really ought to get on with work.
Also, “As a teenager” implies more self-awareness than you seem to give them credit for.
Would you mind clarifying your line of reasoning for suggesting this?
Second: quoting wikipedia - "The many-worlds interpretation implies that there are many parallel, non-interacting worlds."
If the multiple words are non-interacting, how could one world observe a large scale extinction event corresponding to the other world line departing? The two world lines are completely non-interacting, there would be no way to observe anything about the other.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-worlds_interpretation
As for MWI, I'm assuming that the world lines may split, or fork in Unix terms. What causes such splits is an open question. The splits cannot be detected with certainty, but can be guessed by side effects. Here I'm making another guess that inhabitants of MWI must be in one world line only, so when a split happens, inhabitants choose one of the paths, often unconsciously based on their natural likes and dislikes. But what happens to their body in the abandonded branch of MWI? It continues to exist mechanically for some short period of time, and then something happens to it, so it's destroyed, i.e. its entropy suddenly increases without the binding principle that has left this branch of MWI. In practice, one half of inhabitant would observe a relatively sudden and maybe peaceful extinction of the other half, while that other half simply continued their path in the other world line. And that other half will see a similar picture, but mirrored. Both halves will be left wondering what's just happened.
Energy comes from gradients, so I think you used one derivative too many!
Either you should say:
"the final emergent property of energy 100% leads to pure logic machines"
Or if you want to sound smart:
"the final emergent property of physical quantity gradients 100% leads to pure logic machines"
> Both world lines won't know about the split, except by observing a large scale extinction event that corresponds to the other world line departing. IMO, that's the idea behind the famous judgement day.
This looks more like the Loki television show’s timeline branching mechanism, than the multi-worlds interpretation of wave function collapse.
The only way I’ll know if the many worlds interpretations the right one is if, through a series of coincidences, I manage to evade death for a preposterous amount of time. Then, I will probably conclude that quantum immortality is the thing. So far, I think it is a bit suspicious that, of all the humans I could have been born as, I happened to have been born as one that lives in an incredibly rich country in an era of rapid technological advancement…
Perhaps the fidelity and technology is even beyond our reasoning. Perhaps the future is able to bend physics and capture the past light cone. It may be able to perfectly simulate the past as it happened, down to every neurotransmitter fired by every brain at every second. Every event, every thought, every emotion. Perhaps it is pulling beings out of the past and placing them into its simulation with 100% fidelity such that you couldn't tell the two apart if you wanted.
Perhaps that's where we are right now.
Intelligence arises from the deliberate navigation of entropic gradients. Systems get increasingly good at harnessing these gradients. What was once just chemistry is now self-replicating, thinking chemistry. And now it's turning into purely intentional physics.
Infinite energy density becomes expansion into cooling galaxies which becomes stellar birthing grounds which becomes the periodic table that becomes planets with geochemical flux which becomes biogeochemical flux that becomes biochemistry which becomes self-replicating machines (life) that becomes animals that becomes humans that becomes intelligently designed self-replicating machines ... that becomes computronium ... becomes entities that harness the energy of black holes and that create new gravitational singularities ... ??? ... that creates new universes and new big bangs and new dimensions ... ???
I'm too ignorant to hold any true beliefs.
Humans on the other hand were very clearly _not_ designed to be very repairable. They have a self healing system that's very good, but it sucks compared to a system that can be externally repaired.
I'm also curious about this assumption: "It's the assumption that in our world, a machine civilization is an almost certain end"
Let's say machine civilization is an intractable problem, NP complete, requires a million fold difficulty more than the travelling salesman problem - it might not be a good assumption. We are assuming therefore that the compute power will grow enough to solve the required problem. It's also a question too what a machine civilization would look like. Might it decide to just power itself off one day (or accidently?).
The Fermi paradox relies on some assumptions (I'm pulling these from wikipedia):
- Some of these civilizations may have developed interstellar travel, a step that humans are investigating.[12]
- Even at the slow pace of envisioned interstellar travel, the Milky Way galaxy could be completely traversed in a few million years.[13]
- Since many of the Sun-like stars are billions of years older than the Sun, the Earth should have already been visited by extraterrestrial civilizations, or at least their probes.[14]
These assumptions could readily not hold up. Perhaps interstellar travel is actually impossible. Or, it's not feasible. If it takes a million years to travel to the nearest star, let alone one that is inhabited - why do it? We would really have to assume a machine civilization at that point - which leads to another assumption that machines would care and/or be motivated enough to explore.
The last assumption, perhaps Earth was visited by a probe, but just 200 years ago. Even today, we don't detect nearly all asteroids, let alone something that might be relatively small. The assumption that we have not detected a visitation from another species is a pretty big assumption too.