The Earth’s Sun is relatively young in age among all the sorts of stars we’d expect to be able to support biological life, over the history of a whole universe. This timing strongly suggests that we find ourselves existing now, around that relatively young star, because later on, the stars would have already been colonized; and then new life like Earthly life would not have had later chances to emerge!
Soberskeptic: This is conditional on the probability of the ingredients of life turning into life not being extremely low. It could be the case that it’s easy to travel 1000x the speed of light, so long as life is really rare. I don’t think I’ve actually heard a piece of evidence that would indicate the transition from ingredients of life to life is not an extremely rare transition.
So just because you mathematically prove code to be safe given the transistor layout and the usual rules governing transistors, doesn’t mean it could really constrain a superintelligence—or even a program written by a savvy human security researcher!
This makes me nostalgic for the old-school AI safety days, when conversations like this seemed like the most important conversations to be having, and billion dollar companies weren’t speedrunning internet-connected superintelligent hacker-swarms as fast as possible with no seatbelts.
This is conditional on the probability of the ingredients of life turning into life not being extremely low.
But that is precisely the whole point of the argument: if it had indeed been extremely unlikely, then we would expect to be living in a much older universe, one that would have had much more time to meet the necessary conditions!
then we would expect to be living in a much older universe
The issue with that is that it depends on framing us as some kind of outside observer that rolled a set of dice and got slotted into one of a set of available viewpoints, rather than as something that exists independently of the other things that might or might not come to exist at some point.
For example, suppose there is a species that has ten children every generation, all of which survive to reproduce. At some yet-unknown point, the species will die out entirely, all at once. Using your system of reasoning, every single member of this species will assume, with high probability, that it belongs to the last generation!
Soberskeptic: This is conditional on the probability of the ingredients of life turning into life not being extremely low. It could be the case that it’s easy to travel 1000x the speed of light, so long as life is really rare. I don’t think I’ve actually heard a piece of evidence that would indicate the transition from ingredients of life to life is not an extremely rare transition.
This makes me nostalgic for the old-school AI safety days, when conversations like this seemed like the most important conversations to be having, and billion dollar companies weren’t speedrunning internet-connected superintelligent hacker-swarms as fast as possible with no seatbelts.
But that is precisely the whole point of the argument: if it had indeed been extremely unlikely, then we would expect to be living in a much older universe, one that would have had much more time to meet the necessary conditions!
The issue with that is that it depends on framing us as some kind of outside observer that rolled a set of dice and got slotted into one of a set of available viewpoints, rather than as something that exists independently of the other things that might or might not come to exist at some point.
For example, suppose there is a species that has ten children every generation, all of which survive to reproduce. At some yet-unknown point, the species will die out entirely, all at once. Using your system of reasoning, every single member of this species will assume, with high probability, that it belongs to the last generation!