From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Mon Mar 08 1999 - 19:57:16 MST
David Blenkinsop wrote:
>
> What I really notice here is that the above comment from Billy Brown seems to
> suggest that an obstacle of something being "a few orders of magnitude more
> expensive" would necessarily be overcome eventually, maybe taking only a "few
> hundred years" at most before the cost barrier is reduced to something
> manageable. The trouble with cost barriers is that, if the cost of breaking
> through the barrier is too high, maybe no one will do it! As the old saying
> says, "you have to walk before you can run"; what if most would-be space
> travellers never learn to "walk"?
The problem with this theory of the Great Filter, like the simple
Singularity theory, is that it doesn't take into account psychological
differences between races. I suspect that most races are much like
humans in the sense of being individualistic rather than altruistic, and
not very cooperative; it's a stronger evolutionary attractor.
However, I also suspect that at least one in a thousand races will be
strongly cooperative, perhaps hivemind-like, or with authority-related
social emotions so strongly developed that the entire civilization can
be controlled by a single individual. Unlike our race, such a
civilization has a real chance of deliberately avoiding a Singularity
(and surviving) if such is the group consensus; some such races will
also be relentlessly expansionist, and also interventionist. All the
factors, total, sum to no more than a hundred thousand to one, I think -
more than enough for such races to have developed in our own galaxy or
one nearby more than a billion years ago.
Such a race would not be stopped by any cost of spaceflight, nor by a
Singularity, nor by nanowar.
Where are they?
--
sentience@pobox.com Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
http://pobox.com/~sentience/AI_design.temp.html
http://pobox.com/~sentience/singul_arity.html
Disclaimer: Unless otherwise specified, I'm not telling you
everything I think I know.
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