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No it wouldn't. It would mean that the Great Filter is ahead of us. Discovery of life elsewhere is very bad news for mankind.

Nick Bostrom: Why I Hope The Search For ETL Finds Nothing

"Claims of a pending AI apocalypse come almost exclusively from the ranks of individuals such as Musk, Hawking, and Bostrom who possess no formal training in the field" is at best not true, and at worst a serious logical fallacy. Many people who are in the AI field have expressed concern. It is true that Musk, Hawking and Bostrom are some of the most vocal people and noticeable, but that's because they are famous people who are paid attention to already. For actual survey data of experts see for example https://nickbostrom.com/papers/survey.pdf.

Nick Bostrom is the creator of this idea, at least in the current acception. Elon Musk is taking a ride.

Bostrom is a very profound and serious thinker. Very interesting stuff, long reads. Perfect for an autumn Sunday afternoon.

Nadella's ideas, to me, seem good for the most part, but obviously insufficient. He should read more Bostrom.

This is more like scientology than science.

You need to get out more

I see a more subtle but possibly ultimately more dangerous problem.

Imagine we can make AIs that are as smart as humans. Of course, 18 months later they will be twice as smart, and 15 years later they will be a thousand times as smart.

Except that [for STRONG AI] it doesn't work that way. Once such a device is turned on, the time you're talking about is minutes, not years. Here you go for everything that you need to know about the issue, as a primer. AI is not something you can 'program', nor something you can build "laws" into. I see people don't even have a basic grasp of the problems they're discussing. There are far more implications, and I see that the usually bright Slashdot crowd is disappointing me.

That said, there are more imminent dangers for us to dodge. That type of AI Old Bill is talking about won't happen in 100's of years from now. So you can relax for now and enjoy the up coming weekend.

Ray, you're one of the most forward thinking people in the world right now. You've put a lot of thought, over many years into the future of civilization, the impact of technology on individual, society and world culture, from sexuality and what it means to be part of the human endeavor to the particulars of how we might best move towards a more inclusive world.
That said, your cautious, well-informed optimism is not shared by all. In particular, there is a movement of modern-day luddites who have a vastly different view of what the future should be, what the best path for humankind is, and where we should be focusing our efforts.
After reading your "Age of Spiritual Machines", and Derrick Jensen's "Endgame", I realized that the two of you write mostly about the same subject matter -- but from vastly different perspectives. After watching many of your videos, and a live talk by Jensen I have been struck by how large the gap is in The Two Cultures involved -- from reading the material put forward by MIRI to the Club of Rome I have sought at every step to reconcile how the two of you see the world. But what I've been always dreamed of, is the two of you directly responding to the criticisms and ideals of the other directly, in a public discussion -- a kind of intellectual battle for the minds of those in vastly different ingroups, on the order of the Bill Nye–Ken Ham debate if not orders of magnitude more important to the future of mankind.
In the years since I have gotten ahold of Derrick Jensen. And while he's not interested in a realtime debate in person, he has told me that he would be willing to debate you, if you're up for it.
So here's my question:
Would you be willing to debate Derrick Jensen on the future of humanity and civilization in a respectable way, in a public forum of some kind? And if so, under what condition?
Perhaps if the debate was moderated by someone like Nikola Danaylov?

The article was hard to find in its entirety, and since you were too lazy to give a link, here's a link.

I'm starting to become convinced there is simply no way to travel in a meaningful way among the stars. No species has figured out how to do anything like FTL or even slow boating.

That doesn't matter. Even if you don't have FTL you could still build Von Neumann probes which would be able to colonize the galaxy - even with fractions of the speed of light.

http://www.nickbostrom.com/ext...

"If a probe were capable of travelling at onetenth of the speed of light, every planet in the galaxy could thus be colonized within a couple of million years [...]. If travel speed were limited to 1% of light speed, colonization might take twenty million years instead. The exact numbers do not matter much because they are at any rate very short compared to the astronomical time scales involved in the evolution of intelligent life from scratch (billions of years)."

According to the time line
500,000[b] Earth will have likely been hit by a meteorite of roughly 1 km in diameter, assuming it cannot be averted.[15]

[b] This represents the time by which the event will most probably have happened. It may occur randomly at any time from the present.

[15] uses this as a reference http://www.nickbostrom.com/existential/risks.html "existential risks"
Which states: There is a real but very small risk that we will be wiped out by the impact of an asteroid or comet
This is in turn referenced to morrison, D. et al. (1994). The Impact Hazard. In T. Gehrels (Ed.), Hazards Due to Comets and Asteroids. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press.

So 500,000 is just filler
--- just for that answer, I hit Trax3001BBS gold ---

"existential risks" itself http://www.nickbostrom.com/existential/risks.html says were all doomed and then goes into a huge list. "In this paper we shall discuss risks of the sixth category, the one marked with an X. This is the category of global, terminal risks. I shall call these existential risks. Did I mention it's a very large list?

"Existential risks"... One can have so much fun with this link, that it's easy to get carried away.

It so serious, yet it asks the question " How likely is it that superintelligence will come before advanced nanotechnology?" all the thought going on and nobody thinks of Drake equation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation, then putting a bit of thought into the results. - more than likely just the question is more sensational.

I could go on and on, "existential risks" is an incredible piece of work just asking to be ridiculed.

According to the time line
500,000[b] Earth will have likely been hit by a meteorite of roughly 1 km in diameter, assuming it cannot be averted.[15]

[b] This represents the time by which the event will most probably have happened. It may occur randomly at any time from the present.

[15] uses this as a reference http://www.nickbostrom.com/existential/risks.html "existential risks"
Which states: There is a real but very small risk that we will be wiped out by the impact of an asteroid or comet
This is in turn referenced to morrison, D. et al. (1994). The Impact Hazard. In T. Gehrels (Ed.), Hazards Due to Comets and Asteroids. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press.

So 500,000 is just filler
--- just for that answer, I hit Trax3001BBS gold ---

"existential risks" itself http://www.nickbostrom.com/existential/risks.html says were all doomed and then goes into a huge list. "In this paper we shall discuss risks of the sixth category, the one marked with an X. This is the category of global, terminal risks. I shall call these existential risks. Did I mention it's a very large list?

"Existential risks"... One can have so much fun with this link, that it's easy to get carried away.

It so serious, yet it asks the question " How likely is it that superintelligence will come before advanced nanotechnology?" all the thought going on and nobody thinks of Drake equation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation, then putting a bit of thought into the results. - more than likely just the question is more sensational.

I could go on and on, "existential risks" is an incredible piece of work just asking to be ridiculed.

, it's just not possible to build the kind of things you'd see at stellar distances.

I'm curious why you think that given that for example a small Class A stellar engine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_engine appears to be buildable with what we know about materials science. And this isn't the only example of such. The requirements are purely on the amount of resources that need to go in, not physical limitations. Yes, some specific suggestions would require materials that look impossible. For example, an inflexible single piece ringworld is likely to be impossible (the tensile strength among other requirements make it implausible). But many megascale structures aren't in that category.

But let me guess, you believe the aliens use magical particles like tachyons and gravitons to communicate and we're just too stupid to figure it out but when we do we'll be invited to the galactic fraternity, right?

No. Absolutely not. First note that tachyons and gravitons aren't "magical" there's a massive difference between theoretical particles consistent with the laws of physics. It is likely that tachyons do not exist, since they'd either allow causality violations (unlikely) or they'd not allow communication. Similarly, thinking that one could use something like gravitons to communicate is just silly since they'd be incredibly weak. I don't have any belief in some galactic fraternity, but your attempt to pigeon hole rather than read what people write is interesting. Concerns about the Great Filter arise specifically from there being no evidence of anything remotely like that. If there were any reason to think that was at all likely, we could breath a lot easier.

For the record I think that there is life everywhere in the universe because the laws of physics will be the same.

So, we're in complete agreement here. But the problem is what this leads to: it means that out of the civilizations, none of them are trying anything on a large scale, not even the few more ambitious ones. This suggests that once life gets sufficiently advanced, it gets wiped out somehow. The Great Filter is a serious problem: Nick Bostrom and his colleagues at the Future of Humanity Institute for example have given this a lot of thought. See for example http://www.nickbostrom.com/extraterrestrial.pdf. And this is very much the sort of problem where if it exists, pretending it doesn't won't make it go away.

Ageing kills more than all other causes combined, yet is a curable disease. The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant

Have a read through the mprize and SENS pages, projects geared at tackling not only cancer but ageing in general.

Aubrey De Grey addressed this question a while back - what if people stopped dying from aging altogether? Will population explode? Will we immediately cause a bigger problem than we've solved?

Following his reasoning (plus real-world numbers) the answer is no. Personally, I agree with him.

Even in the most extreme of cases, were everyone to just stop dying of age-related causes altogether (including cancer, heart-disease etc) unless a truck hits them, population would not explode overnight. It would take a long time (read: hundreds of years) to become anywhere as apocalyptic as some would have you believe, far more than enough time for us to adapt and apply solutions to (humans have proven an uncanny ability to adapt social structures to evolving environments over the past centuries, having brains is a dang good thing at times) as well as be in turn mitigated by the very same fact that caused it, much like people going from making 15 kids to having three after realizing that all three (rather than one in five) will survive to adulthood if only they washed their hands.
That's to say our current population growth estimates take the existing rate as a given (200 years ago, 15 kids per family per generation was a given), but this very change is likely to change, and put predictions using these numbers far off the mark.

If people will have extended (reproduction-capable) lifetimes, the rate at which they procreate may quite possibly go down as less pressure exists to adhere to the ticking biological clock (aka "we'll have kids later"), much like many people are already preferring to do so towards their 30's rather when they're 16.

And we'd be replacing a BIG problem (causing a LOT of suffering) with a smaller one that can be tackled by education, regulation and generally more humane means than frality and losing one's mental capacity, life or loved ones.

Cancer is NOT a legitimate over-population solution. Neither are genocide, war, smallpox, AIDS or even old age. Much like amputation is not a solution for a muscle cramp.

The idea of promoting it as such is ludicrous.

They should all be cured.
Overpopulation will be addressed in due time, using far better means that we ALREADY HAVE at our disposal.

Last, I heartily encourage you to read this for some perspective on the matter.

My own interpretation is that the machines are actually obedient to the last drop. They are trying to create a perfect world for humans, and the entire contrivance that is the Matrix is really a massive system designed for the machines to understand what will constitute a perfect world for humanity. I think of the Oracle in the Matrix in the sense of the 'oracle Turing machine' described by Alan Turing in the paper "Systems of Logic Based on Ordinals", as a special type of state that the machine can go into that consults an external 'oracle' that directs the evolution of the system in a way that might not be possible for an ordinary Turing machine.

The machines are not doing any of this for their own sake, which would actually make no sense at all to my mind, as all the effort they expend towards doing what they do would be pointless. The only problem was that the machines were mis-programmed in such a way that they elevated a sub-goal into a super-goal, in exactly the way described by Nick Bostrom here (section 4.4). Find a perfect world for humanity, the machines were asked, and they complied by placing all of humanity into a virtual world that it is constantly trying to manipulate to come across what it finds constitutes perfection for humanity.

We need better quality, not quantity of life.

That is the point of this type of research.

You won't be 200 with the body of a 200 year old, but rather 200 with the body of a 21 year old. Hence the reason you had retirement in the first place goes out the window. If I could be 21 for the rest of my life, I wouldn't mind keeping a day job (Heck if you lived that long you could just put a sum of money in a bank and collect on interest in a hundred years.)

Personally, I would like to avoid what happened to my grandparents. Dementia, Alzheimer's, lung cancer, and then pancreatic cancer aren't good ways to end up when your that old.

I would rather die than sit in an old age home and crap my pants and not know who I was or what I was doing that day and not even remember my family. That is why I feel this research is important because it address the issue of aging on the human body rather than just trying to make a human live longer with a decaying body.

Also, whenever the debate of immortality comes up I would like to point out Nick Bostrom's The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant which a very good argument for why death is bad and that we need to take care of the problem of death as soon as possible.

Before I forget, Peter also helped the 2006 Singularity Challenge by donating $100,000 to match everyone's donation to the Singularity Institute which is basically an non-profit organization researching friendly strong AI. (I've donated a small amount of money to them as well)

Sure these goals are almost Sci-Fi or things we may never see in our life time, but I feel that they will be more beneficial to mankind than trying to "band-aid" fix our problems with short term solutions.

Nobody lives forever... nobody SHOULD live forever...

So you want 6-10 billion people to die even if we eventually found the technology to save every last one of them from death?

It is one thing to accept death as one fate, but to say people should get over it and die is like walking into a cancer ward and telling people they shouldn't waste their time with chemotherapy because it is a waste of resources.

And as always when we get into this argument about death we have to pull out the fable of the Dragon which explains in many terms why death is unnecessary.

http://www.nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html

Here's a stronger argument, the Fable of the Dragon Tyrant.

It argues that it is immoral and lethal for us to delay our work into longevity reasearch.

The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant

Here, you should read The Fable of the Dragon Tyrant by Nick Bostrom - it's a great story and a wonderful rebuttle to your point of view.

I've written a small essay with a more or less detailed explanation of the errors. Unfortunately, the final version is available only in Russian and only a rough draft is available in English.

"He proposed a worldwide treaty organization that would ban germ-line genetic engineering"

This is just yet another case of the difficulty balancing our scientific curiousity with our (often warranted) fear of the unknown.

To present the other side of this argument, try reading this.