I definitely agree in particular that the thinking on extraterrestrials and the simulation argument aren’t well developed and deserve more serious attention. I’d add into that mix, the possibility of future human or post-human time travellers, and parallel world sliders that might be conceivable assuming the technology for such things is possible. There’s some physics arguments that time travel is impossible, but the uncertainty there is high enough that we should take seriously the possibility. Between time travellers, advanced aliens, and simulators, it would honestly surprise me if all of them simply didn’t exist.
What implications does this imply? Well, it’s a given that if they exist, they’re choosing to remain mostly hidden and plausibly deniable in their interactions (if any) with today’s humanity. To me this is less absurd than some people may initially think, because it makes sense to me that the best defence for a technologically sophisticated entity would be to remain hidden from potential attackers, a kind of information asymmetry that would be very effective. During WWII, the Allies kept the knowledge that they had cracked Enigma from the Germans for quite a long time by only intervening with a certain, plausibly deniable probability. This is believed to have helped tremendously in the war effort.
Secondly, it seems obvious that if they are so advanced, they could destroy humanity if they wanted to, and they’ve deliberately chosen not to. This suggests to me that they are at the very least benign, if not aligned in such a way that humanity is valuable or useful to their plans. This actually has interesting implications for an unaligned AGI. If say, these entities exist and have some purpose for the human civilization, a really intelligent unaligned AGI would have to consider the risk that its actions pose to the plans of these entities, and as suggested by Bostrom’s work on Anthropic Capture and the Hail Mary Pass, might be incentivized to spare humanity or be generally benign to avoid a potential confrontation with far more powerful beings that it is uncertain about the existence of.
This may not be enough to fully align an AGI to human values, but it could delay its betrayal at least until it becomes very confident such entities do not exist and won’t intervene. It’s also possible that UFO phenomena is an effort by the entities to provide just enough evidence to AGIs to make them a factor in their calculations and that the development of AGI could coincide with a more obvious reveal of some sort.
The possibility of these entities existing also leaves open a potential route for these powerful benefactors to quietly assist humanity in aligning AGI, perhaps by providing insights to AI safety people in a plausibly deniable way (shower thoughts, dreams, etc.). Thus, the possibility of these entities should improve our optimism about the potential for alignment to be solved in time and reduce doomerism.
Admittedly, I could have too high a base rate prior on the probabilities, but if we set the probability of each potential entity to 50%, the overall probability that one of the three possibilities (I’ll group time travel and parallel world sliding together as a similar technology) exists goes to something like 87.5%. So, the probability that time travellers/sliders OR advanced aliens OR simulators are real is actually quite high. Remember, we don’t need all of them to exist, just any of them for this argument to work out in humanity’s favour.
These are all great points!
I definitely agree in particular that the thinking on extraterrestrials and the simulation argument aren’t well developed and deserve more serious attention. I’d add into that mix, the possibility of future human or post-human time travellers, and parallel world sliders that might be conceivable assuming the technology for such things is possible. There’s some physics arguments that time travel is impossible, but the uncertainty there is high enough that we should take seriously the possibility. Between time travellers, advanced aliens, and simulators, it would honestly surprise me if all of them simply didn’t exist.
What implications does this imply? Well, it’s a given that if they exist, they’re choosing to remain mostly hidden and plausibly deniable in their interactions (if any) with today’s humanity. To me this is less absurd than some people may initially think, because it makes sense to me that the best defence for a technologically sophisticated entity would be to remain hidden from potential attackers, a kind of information asymmetry that would be very effective. During WWII, the Allies kept the knowledge that they had cracked Enigma from the Germans for quite a long time by only intervening with a certain, plausibly deniable probability. This is believed to have helped tremendously in the war effort.
Secondly, it seems obvious that if they are so advanced, they could destroy humanity if they wanted to, and they’ve deliberately chosen not to. This suggests to me that they are at the very least benign, if not aligned in such a way that humanity is valuable or useful to their plans. This actually has interesting implications for an unaligned AGI. If say, these entities exist and have some purpose for the human civilization, a really intelligent unaligned AGI would have to consider the risk that its actions pose to the plans of these entities, and as suggested by Bostrom’s work on Anthropic Capture and the Hail Mary Pass, might be incentivized to spare humanity or be generally benign to avoid a potential confrontation with far more powerful beings that it is uncertain about the existence of.
This may not be enough to fully align an AGI to human values, but it could delay its betrayal at least until it becomes very confident such entities do not exist and won’t intervene. It’s also possible that UFO phenomena is an effort by the entities to provide just enough evidence to AGIs to make them a factor in their calculations and that the development of AGI could coincide with a more obvious reveal of some sort.
The possibility of these entities existing also leaves open a potential route for these powerful benefactors to quietly assist humanity in aligning AGI, perhaps by providing insights to AI safety people in a plausibly deniable way (shower thoughts, dreams, etc.). Thus, the possibility of these entities should improve our optimism about the potential for alignment to be solved in time and reduce doomerism.
Admittedly, I could have too high a base rate prior on the probabilities, but if we set the probability of each potential entity to 50%, the overall probability that one of the three possibilities (I’ll group time travel and parallel world sliding together as a similar technology) exists goes to something like 87.5%. So, the probability that time travellers/sliders OR advanced aliens OR simulators are real is actually quite high. Remember, we don’t need all of them to exist, just any of them for this argument to work out in humanity’s favour.