I suspect that the OP’s argument implies that we should double down on priors which imply the Great Filter and are yet consistent with observations. Suppose that the Milky way has habitable planets and that any civilisation generates observers before either destroying itself with probability 50% or reaching the maximal technological level. Also assume that intergalactic travel is impossible and that we have a probability to be in a universe where interstellar travel is impossible, while all other universes cause the first civilisation which reached the maximal tech level to prevent the emergence of others and to generate observers. Then the universe with no interstellar travel would generate observers on a stage like ours, while the universe with interstellar travel would generate such observers, meaning that a random observer like us is 50 times more likely to be in a universe without interstellar travel.
On the other hand, if the probability that interstellar travel is impossible was then an observer like us would be times MORE likely to be in a universe WITH interstellar travel, and changing the number of habitable reachable planets to (which is around the number of such planets in the entire reachable universe!) would mean that we are times more likely to be in a universe with interstellar travel.
What I struggle to understand is how many bits of evidence already point a perfect Bayesian in the direction of interstellar travel being possible. In a manner similar to Yudkowsky, I suspect that the amount of evidence pointing towards known physics is at least on the order of thousands of bits.
Well, we do know that interstellar travel is possible, just currently very hard. It’s a technological issue, not a physical one. I can certainly imagine slow travel, a few thousands km/s, being possible with nuclear rocket propulsion or other tech. Getting a spaceship-size object traveling at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light is a different story, anything like that would create observational artifacts visible from far away, so those probably aren’t anywhere in the observed past light cone. But I am not sure how this is related to the evaluation of the odds of AIpocalypse.
I suspect that the OP’s argument implies that we should double down on priors which imply the Great Filter and are yet consistent with observations. Suppose that the Milky way has
On the other hand, if the probability that interstellar travel is impossible was
What I struggle to understand is how many bits of evidence already point a perfect Bayesian in the direction of interstellar travel being possible. In a manner similar to Yudkowsky, I suspect that the amount of evidence pointing towards known physics is at least on the order of thousands of bits.
Well, we do know that interstellar travel is possible, just currently very hard. It’s a technological issue, not a physical one. I can certainly imagine slow travel, a few thousands km/s, being possible with nuclear rocket propulsion or other tech. Getting a spaceship-size object traveling at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light is a different story, anything like that would create observational artifacts visible from far away, so those probably aren’t anywhere in the observed past light cone. But I am not sure how this is related to the evaluation of the odds of AIpocalypse.