From p. 82 of "Better Angels of Our Nature" by Steven Pinker:
"The journalist Steven Sailer recounts an exchange from early 20th-century England: “A hereditary member of the British House of Lords complained that Prime Minister Lloyd George had created new Lords solely because they were self-made millionaires who had only recently acquired large acreages. When asked, “How did your ancestor become a Lord?” he replied sternly, “With the battle-ax, sir, with the battle-ax!”"
The secret to being quoted in important books is poor sourcing: although that anecdote made a vivid impression upon me, I have no idea anymore where it’s from.
And this is why I roll my eyes at any comment that starts with, "I asked ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini and this is what it had to say:," and then skip it. When reading a blog with a reasonably intelligent readership, these things are still _useless_ compared to the collective intelligence of other humans.
I understand from tech people that these can be very useful for automating basic code or bouncing ideas around for tricky problems, but for humanities, conversation, and actual worldly knowledge, they do nothing but spout cliches, flattery, and hallucinations.
It’s very useful if it gives you a supposed source, particularly if it does so when Google fails. Google can then let you check whether the source actually says it, but something with a 10-30% accuracy rate on sourcing quotes that Google can’t find is actually really valuable, since we already have the technology to check these quotes.
I suspect quotations are more challenging for LLMs because of the frequency of misattribution of quotes to famous people in the training data's source literature. Lincoln, Twain, and Churchill have slews of quotes misattributed to them.
Having said that, I find ChatGPT and CoPilot very useful for general writeups of subjects at an intro level. But I always ask the AI for links to references and double-check them. Chat and CoP are getting better — in the past, they both partially or completely hallucinated about 25% of the references. Nowadays, they're generally getting the references correct, but they frequently misstate or misunderstand the conclusions in the references. Caveat emptor.
Except a scan of Waverley reveals that it is not the source of the quote at all, simply the AI hallucinating. (Leaving as an exercise for the reader why we do indeed have Copilot)
A good example of how AI slop and related problems are increasingly polluting high-quality human fora like ACX and LW2. Some people are still bothering to check or apply some critical thinking to LLM outputs... but for how long, as others keep freeriding on their efforts, taking the benefits of the implicit trust & credibility extended to human commenters while shirking effort and epistemic standards?
(Also, note the lack of critical thinking here, in addition to the laziness in not checking in a trivially available text. Why would a 20th century nonfiction anecdote about Lloyd George & newly-elevated rich peers to the British parliament be from an early 1800s novel by a novelist famous for romantic mythologizing writing about Scotland or medieval England? At the very least, this should make you wonder - even if it was true, and Sailer had badly distorted the anecdote, how could the LLM recognize the 'real' anecdote in a Scottish fantasy a century earlier?)
"Why would a 20th century nonfiction anecdote about Lloyd George & newly-elevated rich peers to the British parliament be from an early 1800s novel by a novelist famous for romantic mythologizing writing about Scotland or medieval England?"
Because in so many cases, quotes get mangled, reformatted, and attributed to sixteen different "So-and-so once said" as they get passed along.
So it's not out of all possible bounds that a quote from a novel got Chinese Whispers treatment of ending up being attributed to a hereditary peer under Lloyd George's government.
I'm disappointed that the attribution turns out to be false, so we still don't know where the original came from or who in fact said it, if it was said at all and not invented by somebody on the Internet.
> Because in so many cases, quotes get mangled, reformatted, and attributed to sixteen different
Indeed, hence my last sentence... It would be impressive enough for a LLM to be able to recount the source if the story were unmangled and recounted correctly; but to do so while it would have to be almost totally transformed? That's Radio Yerevan level inference.
I didn't bring this up, because this is unreasonable for an ordinary commenter to know this, and I was focusing on what is reasonable for an ordinary commenter to do or know. But the changes here are not just extremely implausible in their own right, they are also fairly implausible as a corrupted transformation of a plausible Walter Scott original: because they are too extensive, the wrong kinds, over a relatively short period of time (~1 century) for a writing-heavy culture, and against the selective pressure of a widely-read original correcting mutations. After tracking down hundreds of these sorts of things over the years, while quotes and stories do get mangled and transformed, if there was some version which was actually about a Scottish parliament admitting some new landlords (not businessmen buying estates) in the mid-1700s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waverley_(novel)#Plot) or earlier, to make it fit, this would be a pretty unusual case, because the putative original would have to be transformed in both time, place, *and* rationale, while the transforms are usually more like a single major corruption combined with simplification and dropping of details which undermine the moral of the story. So if I was investigating this quote, I would expect one of the time, place, or personage to be false and the exact battle-axe line probably a memetically-fitter version of a much clunkier Walter Scottian-style original; but for all 3 of them to be likely false, as implied by a _Waverly_ attribution, I would be highly skeptical.
It is not impossible, because wacky things can happen in the chain of transmission (I still remember the quote I was increasingly sure was completely fake until I manged to trace it to the splicing of 3 different quotes from 3 different books & 2 authors, which I still cannot explain), but I would definitely be looking very hard at anyone, much less a LLM, claiming that that Churchill story obviously came from _Waverly_. Because that is just not a plausible origin for an uncorrupted 'original'. It's too many, too large, mutations, over too short a time, diverging from a too-well known source.
Sorry guys! I didn't think it was sufficiently important to check. Usually I do.
And I did say it was from Copilot so you were free to make your own assessment.
As for it being mangled: absolutely and that's what LLM's are good at figuring out (sometimes, anyway!)
(By the way, no criticism, but I have to point out that Lloyd George has now morphed into Churchill!)
If you asked a knowledgable friend they might say "sounds a bit like Walter Scott's 'Waverley'", but Copilot arrogantly stated it as a fact. When I went back to check it admitted it didn't have access to the text due to copyright (despite it being well out of copyright with the full text on the web).
This is a perfect example of how quote distortion works. You've re-misattributed (mis-misattributed? meta-misattributed?) the OP's battle-axe quote to Churchill when the OP thought it was Lloyd George. The next time an LLM slurps up the ACX conversations, Churchill may come up as the quotee. LOL!
Don't worry about violence, Steve. The new AI Social Worker Response Drones (we'll have defunded the police successfully come the Singularity, you know) will be available 24/7 to pacify any undesirable anti-social behaviour with counselling, appropriate medication if required, and death rays.
Sorry, did I say 'death rays'? I meant of course MAID Mobile Units!
Didn't the cannons used to be marked 'the last argument of kings'?
I totally agree--a lot of the way this plays out in the real world tends to be ignored. These 'decentralized networks' still tend to have heavy, bulky, expensive points of failure. What if some government or rebel group starts blowing up datacenters?
Yes, in France under the Ancien Régime: ultima ratio regum. I saw one with this inscription in a museum, I think probably the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin.
There are a bunch floating around Europe, I assume because of the Napoleonic Wars. Obviously the Musée de l'Armée in Paris has entire rows of old cannon with that motto, but I also saw a few at the Kriegsmuseum in Vienna (along with numerous other cannon with mottos, heraldic images, some Arabic calligraphy courtesy of the Turks...).
I would be in favor of putting coats of arms and cool mottos on our war materiel again, not gonna lie. Surely our machine civilization can manage this much?
Presumably the rebel group gets wiped out by a swarm of drones. If it's a government we're back to the question Scott raises in the post of whether the AIs (which control the drones) answer to the government ahead of the companies that made them.
I wonder if the distant origin of the story is an anecdote from the Quo warranto hearings conducted in England under Edward I. Quo warranto was a legal process that inquired "by what right" [literally, "warrant"] a given claim (to a specific right, as to judge tenants in a manorial court, or the right to collect some form or forms of rent on a piece of land, etc.) was held. Typically, it asked claimants to produce a document by which the claim had been granted (typically, again, by the king). Supposedly the Earl of Warenne responded by marching into the court and slamming a rusty sword down on the desk where the clerks were writing, while exclaiming something like, "I hold by THIS right"! According to the story, the sword had been wielded by the earl's ancestor, who had ridden with William the Conqueror. The tale is recounted and discussed in ch. 1 of Michael Clanchy's excellent From Memory to Written Record. England 1066-1307.
Quotes and provenance thereof aside, this is indeed the elephant in the room. I would like Scott to write a whole new post addressing violence and the post-singularity; or even post GPT 5, response to it.
For what it’s worth, Steve, your writing’s had an enormous influence on my understanding of the world and its inhabitants for which I’m eternally grateful.
Many decades from now, I expect you’ll be vindicated in the scientific landscape. Until then, know that there are voices out there less brave than yours who appreciate your academic martyrdom. You’re on the right side of history, I believe that earnestly.
"None of these things happen, and non-plutocrats are stuck on Earth while the plutocrats colonize the galaxy. It doesn’t make sense for 3,000 people to colonize the galaxy on their own, so they will need some source of colonists. If they don’t use poor people, then whom?"
-- maybe there could be some sort of Bobiverse-like scenario where the plutocrats create many copies of their own uploaded minds.
We aren't going to "colonize the galaxy" barring some inconceivable new physics discoveries. The velocity of light is going to remain the universe's speed limit and that will keep us in our own solar system indefinitely. I'd give more likely odds to our learning how to travel between Earths in alternate timelines and colonizing those where humans did not evolve (but are still friendly to our type of life).
If stars are on average 10 LY apart, speed is 0.1 c and it takes 1000 years after arriving at a star to build new probes, then it would take about 10 million years to colonise the galaxy, which is bugger all time in cosmic terms.
The singularity isn't magic, you would still require a certain amount of energy to accelerate an object of certain mass (and decelerate it at the other end of the trip) which is enormous. You'd have to be converting and storing the lifetime energy output of several stars, I doubt any technological breakthrough is going to enable this. And at those velocities, even a tiny little space pebble would demolish you. Neither human bodies nor physical databanks are going to travel between the stars.
If humans are replaced by machines, the machines may well end up slinging around radio messages across the galaxy until heat death arrives. Maybe they manage to replicate themselves on some other planet by showing a scientist there how to create a copy and then kill all the original inhabitants of that planet too. I guess that's colonization.
10% light speed, means that the kinetic energy is about the same as the fusion energy of hydrogen. That means, for every ton of space ship, you need a ton of hydrogen to fuse.
Uranium isn't quite as energy dense, but isn't far off.
This means that even if you sent the whole earth, you would still be using a tiny fraction of the suns total output.
A gigawatt nuclear reactor running for 30 years gives enough energy to get a 1 ton spacecraft up to 10% light speed.
How heavy does an interstellar spacecraft need to be? Can we send a single nanobot and get it to build a radio receiver when it lands?
This. Cjw is wrong by more than sixteen orders of magnitude. WP on the Sun contains the sentence:
> Every second, the Sun's core fuses about 600 billion kilograms (kg) of hydrogen into helium and converts 4 billion kg of matter into energy.
Rule of thumb, converting 1kg of matter will provide the energy to accelerate another kilogram to a pretty decent relativistic velocity, certainly more than 0.1c. So our local modest Sol could power one 4 million ton spaceship per second.
Heck, with the energy harvested in 50 million years -- still much shorted than the lifetime of our sun -- we could send Earth itself as a relativistic spaceship.
The problem is not energy, and never has been energy. The problem is the tyranny of the rocket equation. Even fusion power will give you limited exhaust velocities well below c. That being said, travelling at 0.01c will not take that much longer, either.
I appreciate the correction, I had mixed that up in my head with a discussion of a different interstellar travel method. Still it seems that couldn't be right for ships going to a fixed destination, because a 2nd ton of fuel would have to go with you to decelerate at the other end, and that ton of fuel would also require a ton of fuel to accelerate at the outset, adjusting for spent fuel reducing the mass over time. But I accept that it's better, obviously you can go a bit slower and make it work out, and 10000 years vs 20000 years may not matter (although maybe it does? I don't know what sorts of material components would be required and there'd have to be oxygen so the internal components wouldn't be in a vacuum.)
Supposing you could manage this, it's still a non-trivial amount of energy, you would need a pretty darn good idea where you were going to make it worthwhile. We certainly haven't gotten any information yet about other habitable planets that would be good enough to justify trying such a trip. And I can't really see much point in it, too far away for trade, most of your descendants will live and die on a ship, when you get there whoop-de-doo you're on another planet, so what? About the only justification I could imagine is to get *away* from something on Earth, say to escape the ASI if you could somehow ensure no copies of it snuck aboard, and it wouldn't really matter in that case whether there was a destination.
If all you had to do was send out lightweight Voyagers that didn't need to decelerate, that seems plausible. Good enough perhaps for the ASI to replicate itself after taking over Earth, but not gonna do much for us.
I think if it was about machines there would be ways. Like create miniaturized swarms of tiny robots with all the requisite data to start up a local building centre and sling those at high speeds, accepting that a X% will not make it - as long as enough do.
But humans is another story. We have very specific mass, temperature, maximum acceleration etc. requirements to be transported somewhere and reach it alive. And those requirements, combined with the rules of relativity, are forbidding. The engineering of it is a nightmare and it's very well possible that human interstellar travel might simply be not doable.
I think 0.1c is a bit fast. Also I've got an opinion that folks who have lived for a thousand years in a generation ship will want to continue living in the generation ship, and will just build multiple new ones when they reach a rich source of materials.
After such a journey, the prospect of reaching a planet to live on will have taken on a deeply religious significance. If the planet they reached turns out to be inviting enough in practical terms, there would be more than enough people wanting to stay to give them a chance as a colony.
You're assuming that every star has planets that can support life and provide raw materials for further colonization. That is not the case. Even at the more optimistic levels of predictions most stars will not offer a suitable environment. And you're also forgetting something else: entropy. Nothing is immortal, certainly not any machine we humans create or ever will. Nor us humans either.
The answer to Fermi's purported paradox really is that simple: the universe is too vast, the distances too great and Time is too brutal a tyrant over all physical matter. Whatever wonders we achieve they will be achieved locally only
Though do note the one little proviso I did allow-- there may many Earths and perhaps we can find others suitable for ourselves across the vast otherness of Elsewhere.
“You're assuming that every star has planets that can support life” — no I’m not. I’m assuming raw materials, but these could be in the form of asteroids or lifeless planets.
When we colonise the universe, if we do, it’ll very likely be as uploaded minds, since squishy humans are inefficient in space.
“And you're also forgetting something else: entropy. Nothing is immortal, certainly not any machine we humans create or ever will. Nor us humans either.“ — yes the posthumans that colonise the universe will change over time. Of course they will.
This is not accurate. Life is not a real-valued field that can diffuse even through potential barriers that cause it to attenuate exponentially and then simply replenish itself whenever it encounters favourable conditions. If the barrier is harsh enough, it is entirely possible for there to be a significant non-zero (even a ~1) probability that no lifeform will ever cross it, no matter how hard they try, before the Sun goes nova and we all die anyway.
It is absolutely an option that colonizing the galaxy is fundamentally impossible for all practical purposes. Or that it is impossible for us because we were born in an area of the galaxy and in a solar system where we simply don't have the necessary jumping points and resources to do so. Maybe somewhere else near the nucleus of the Milky Way there is a civilization who has a second habitable but empty planet in their own star system and another star only 0.2 LY away and they are much better positioned to learn the basics of space colonization than us, whose closest options in the Goldilocks zone are a barren satellite, a barely less barren planet, and the worst hellhole you could possibly imagine.
What makes the physical impossibility of reaching alternate timelines more likely to be proven false by some new discovery than the impossibility of faster than light travel? If the other worlds are based on the many-world interpretation, we're forbidden from reaching them by the linearity of the Hamiltonian which, though perhaps more obscure than the speed of light limit, is much more fundamental. If it's the version of multiverses from eternal inflation or the string theory landscape or something, those would literally just be other locations, far farther away than the rest of the galaxy. If it's some sort of time travel thing, time travel being possible implies FTL is.
Elsewhere is not governed the same physical laws as four dimensional universes like ours. It isn't even governed by the same geometry, possibly not by the scale arithmetic.
I'm a bit annoyed that your paper with Sandberg was published over a decade ago and most discourse around this topic is still at this level. The main knock on the Fermi paradox for me is Sandberg et al's dissolution of it via incorporating parameter uncertainty, but it felt really nice for me to know from reading your paper that known physics & engineering don't present an insurmountable obstacle to us spreading across the galaxies in due course. Anyhow, thanks for writing it! :)
If you can solve death, galactic colonization is pretty easy. You just sleep through the journey. This is why I'm always annoyed by the fixation on FTL travel, it's probably impossible & not remotely necessary.
I think you're being pedantic here and ignoring the substantive point. 'Death' of course comes for everyone, but there's an enormous practical difference between that and the reality of senescence, which is not required by physics. A lifespan of 100,000 years is more than sufficient to achieve whatever colonization goals a person wants, and really there's no reason to say that 100,000 couldn't become 1,000,000.
Entropy can be locally reduced as long as it is increased in the global system -- i.e., there is no physical contradiction with extending life using energy/matter inputs from the broader world.
The entire model of "space colonization" you're imagining here seems to be some sort of unrealistic Star Trek style scenario based heavily on historical naval exploration. What you need to realize is that this is exactly backwards, it's actually airless rocks that are the best candidate for colonization precisely because they're easy for space industry to get stuff to and from.
In reality at a certain tech level nearly every icy rock is a good candidate for colonization because all you need is energy (in the form of fission and/or fusion fuel) and raw materials. So in reality we don't need to build anything like generation ships to colonize other stars: Rather civilization could sprawl outwards colonizing countless icy bodies until this outwards sprawl hits another stars Oort cloud and then work inwards gradually from there.
Granted there are other faster means of colonization. However, even in a very pessimistic scenario you can still colonize the galaxy, just not at relativistic speed.
Why poor people, unless you want the pleasure of being a Russian aristocrat with a raft of serfs of your very own? Much more efficient and sensible to send out colony ships full of robots which can self-assemble on site, do the physical work of setting up the base, get the local version of an AI up and running, and then the pleasure domes will be all operating awaiting the arrival of the plutocrats.
Think Asimov's Solarians, from his Robot series:
"Inhabited by Spacer descendants, Solaria is the fiftieth and last Spacer World settled in the first wave of interstellar settlement. It was occupied from approximately 4627 AD by inhabitants of the neighboring world Nexon, originally for summer homes. ...The Solarians specialized in the construction of robots, which they exported to the other Spacer Worlds. Solarian robots were noted for their variety and excellence.
...Originally, there were about 20,000 people living in vast estates individually or as married couples. There were thousands of robots for every Solarian. Almost all of the work and manufacturing was conducted by robots. The population was kept stable through strict birth and immigration controls. In the era of Robots and Empire, no more than five thousand Solarians were known to remain. Twenty thousand years later, the population was twelve hundred, with just one human per estate."
In the Robot novels, there were a few reasons. One was that Asimov (and therefore also his in-universe politicians and economic planners) believed in Malthusian population economics, that per capita access to natural resources was the limiting factor for prosperity. So before the Settler era (starting towards the end of the Robot novels), everyone practiced population control to prevent standard of living from declining.
For the Solarians in particular, there was an extreme cultural aversion to being in the physical presence of another human, with even marital relations seen as an unpleasant duty. All social contact took place through holographic zoom calls. The backstory was that they'd spread out so much that in-person contact became first unfamiliar and uncomfortable and later a violation of privacy taboos. And also there was a self-selection effect where Solarians who didn't like the Solarians lifestyle fucked off to Aurora or another Spacer world where people did actually see one another in person from time to time. So the Solarians that remained took extreme measures to make sure that their planet remained uncrowded enough to sustain their lifestyle.
The Spacers also have a backstory of practicing Nazi-esque eugenics that was only just starting to mellow when the novels begin. They had strict rules against immigrants who didn't match their ideal (back when they still took immigrants from Earth at all) and had eugenics-based licensing for having kids, complete with mandatory killing of "defective" children. This is mentioned in passing in Caves of Steel and Robots of Dawn, and is a central theme of the novella Mother Earth.
"The backstory was that they'd spread out so much that in-person contact became first unfamiliar and uncomfortable and later a violation of privacy taboos."
Yes, and if I'm remembering correctly, all the child-raising was done by robots, so Solarians grew up unaccustomed to physical contact with other humans. To the extent that one of them nearly gets physically ill when in a room with the detective from Earth who talks about meeting "face-to-face", which reminds our Solarian that he's actually breathing the same air as another human in the room with him, meaning that some of what he's inhaling has been exhaled by the other person. This is about as disgusting to him as considering licking up someone's saliva would be to us.
I re-read the books recently, and that's a good highlights reel. The robot creche had a few plot points in it, not least the Shenandoah around the First and Second Laws required to get robot caretaker to discipline their charge.
Solarians reactions to Bailey insisting on in-person conversations ranged from "kinda into it, in an ashamed kinky way" to "prepared to literally commit suicide if he thinks there's another human about to enter his house", with the spit-licking reaction being pretty close to the median.
> Solarians reactions to Bailey insisting on in-person conversations ranged from "kinda into it, in an ashamed kinky way" to "prepared to literally commit suicide if he thinks there's another human about to enter his house"
That is in “Foundation and Earth” as well when they’re searching the Spacer planets to find earth. The Solarians at that point have lobes to telepathically control energy and compete between their estates for stuff like having the best apples for prestige.
We already have people penning plaints about fertility decline and the boys over at The Motte discussing ways to reverse this (mainly by treating women like cattle, and I'm a freakin' small-t traditional Catholic with socially conservative views, so imagine how hardline dumb their suggestions have to be, to alienate *me*).
Very rich people won't necessarily want or need to have sixteen kids (Elon is an outlier here, bless the guy). If they can just interact with their peers on their luxury estates, insulated from the mass of the grubby proles who follow their every moment online, with super-efficient AI to run everything for them and all their whims catered to by luxury better-than-human servant robots, why would they fill up their luxury world with more people than whatever is considered the optimum? If they have to split off parts of their estate for their children to inherit, then by the social status games that are being put forward as replacement for human striving, the one that loses the most land/holdings divvying it up between four kids, as against the person who has only one or even no children, loses out. And losing out is going to sting even harder, in a society where ultra-mega-super conspicuous possession of resources is what marks you out as the crème de la crème.
Maybe if you can send your sprogs off-world to settle their *own* luxury gated community world, then the plutocrats will have kids. But exclusivity is the name of the game, and having tens or hundreds of millions crowding up your summer homes planet isn't on the to-do list.
Remember Martha's Vineyard and the immigrants? How many of the summer residents happily opened up their vacant holiday homes there?
It’s really easy to have kids as a rich person or a poor person. The middle class is who gets screwed by the costs, sets you back at least one subclass, I’m a lawyer and would’ve been living like a first year school teacher or entry level office worker if I’d had children. The poor are already poor and get subsidized and have little to do anyhow, and the rich can either indulge it or hire nannies, but the middle class has to actually work and then be in child duty all night and pay the full balance due.
I'm sure that you've heard the common complaint that you just can't get the help nowadays. Particularly when nearly all purchasing has moved to online shopping, and you can't trust those dropshippers to actually have what you want in stock and deliver it as ordered.
You need to be careful that they aren't confused about you asking for one of these:
"Much more efficient and sensible to send out colony ships full of robots which can self-assemble on site, do the physical work of setting up the base, get the local version of an AI up and running, and then the pleasure domes will be all operating awaiting the arrival of the plutocrats."
Agreed. Likewise, the first manned Mars mission will be preceded by an unmanned mission that drops off supplies, structures, and robots at the landing site.
Re: Much more efficient and sensible to send out colony ships full of robots which can self-assemble on site
They will break down, as will such a shop, long before it gets anywhere useful. Again: Second Law of Thermodynamics. And such a ship would be a closed system, unlike the Earth which is constantly receiving energy from the sun. Apart from chaotic radiation (much more likely to do harm than good) and swarms upon swarms of neutrinos which seldom deign to interact with ordinary matter, there's nothing out there for vast distances.
It is already true that there are many actual human beings who are better poets, philosophers, singers, etc. than anyone I actually know, but I am still interested in their poetry, thoughts, and songs (voices)--that is, in the work of people I know. The whole idea that "better" is the only standard of interest is actually rather odd. It's not even clear what it means. Better to whom? For what purpose? For the purpose of knowing what someone else thinks or wants to express?
I don't think any of this will ever happen, but if it does, then life will not lack interest merely because a machine can produce what someone thinks is a "better" song.
I think there probably is some sort of objective artistic quality in the sense some people are more attractive than others (human preferences are correlated), though damned if I can tell you what it is.
The older I get, and perhaps the more sophisticated the attempts at maximizing perfection, the more I value amateur attempts over professional. Watching some professional sports is actually really boring. The absolute best at each sport have so perfected their techniques that the games all go a certain way, forced by the meta of the sport.
And I don't think I'm the only one feeling this. College football is quite popular. Even high school football has a pretty big following, beyond the families of the players. I would definitely rather play a sport myself or watch a family member play than watch a professional game.
I also value my children's drawings and musical performances better than professional. This one is different than sports, because I do value professional more than other people's amateur attempts, but still less than people close to me.
I've joked about a meta-Olympic event: on the day of the competition, one event is chosen at random from all Olympic events, and the previously chosen athletes them have to compete against each other in that event with very little time to prepare. What kind of person do you send to compete in something like that?
My prediction is that for anything that looks like a sport, almost any professional athlete will have a massive advantage over almost anyone else.
You invent some completely new sport that isn't very similar to anything anyone has ever played before. You expose 100 people to it, 99 normal people in reasonable health and fitness, one guy who warms the bench of a not-very-good NBA team. I think in almost all cases, the NBA benchwarmer will be the best player of the 100 within a few days of everyone being exposed to the game, and probably the best player by a big margin. Because while there are specific skills you need to be an NBA player (shooting, setting screens, boxing out, handling the ball, etc.), a lot of what you need is general atheticism--fast reflexes, strength, endurance, good eye-hand coordination, good physical intuitions for where a ball/puck/frisbee/birdie will go, etc. And the NBA benchwarmer will have all of those in spades, or he would not even be on the bench of that team.
That still leaves open a lot of questions about what type of athlete to send, though. A weightlifter and a marathon runner have very different builds; what does the optimal 'jack-of-all-trades' athlete look like?
I literally last evening saw a commercial for a cooking show in which the chefs are each dealt a random card saying something like "no salt" or "you can't taste-test it as you're making it".
In competitive Age of Empires 2 (bear with me) there is a system for players to pick the civilisations they will play but tournaments have started adding random bans at the start of each match, so players cannot fully plan in advance and audiences will see different civilisations played. The maps are also procedurally generated but not identical each time (unlike those in some other competitively played Real Time Strategy games such as Starcraft) so that players have to scout and adapt in each game.
I still find interesting how the meta changes over time in these games (whether NBA or NFL), and how nobody really plays the exact same way (due to things like players getting injured or player uniqueness), but I do agree that there's much higher variance at the amateur levels. For chess I'd agree with you, and consider 960 / Fischer random chess and Armageddon-style tournament formats a breath of fresh air.
The game I am currently hooked on, Beyond All Reason, desperately needs this. Enforcement of its multiplayer meta has become so childish and unpleasant that it risks strangling an excellent title at birth by stalling the recruitment of new players. (The game's subreddit is currently consumed by argument over whether or not that has already irrevocably happened.)
The developers say that BAR (as it's called) will soon get a matchmaking function of some kind, such that players can quickly/easily find matches at their individual or team player-rating level. Hasn't arrived yet so we dunno whether or how well that will work. If it does work then one of the first effects hopefully will be to allow new/learning players to play and learn in peace vs each other, thereby encouraging them to stick with it despite the game's steep competitive learning curve. The developers have an agreement for release of the game on Steam and it may be that they won't go through with that without the matchmaking feature.
If the matchmaking could in some way undermine BAR's rigid meta that would also be great in my view. Random-generated game maps would have some of that effect; but that feature would be a serious programming lift for a game of BAR's complexity so I don't expect it.
Watching good games of that I often have a strong feeling that it is the real game, and what pros play is some stunted offshoot. Not only is the range of viable strategies narrower at elite level, but players don't get much opportunity to problem-solve in-game. You mostly need to be prepping the counter before an attack hits or it's too late, so all the theorycrafting and experimentation has to take place outside the competitive games.
I am generally not interested in bad media. The way subpar media still has its place is by occupying niches - there might be a lot of great poets, but only this one writes about this specific topic that really speaks to me. There might be a lot of great movies, but only this one touched the idea that I think is really fun. Here, occupying the niche compensates for lesser quality.
In the age of AI, niches would evaporate. Regardless of what niche it is, an AI would do a better job than a human would, and they would be able to do it on the fly. You have this really weird set of sci-fi preferences? Just feed them into an AI and receive your perfect book. Or not perfect, but better than anything that a human could've made.
The only fleeing hope for the artists is that there will be a significant movement for non-AI media, and ways to reliably detect AI generated stuff.
I think there's an at least vaguely plausible scenario where AI never really gets "better than the best" compared to humans, just better at applying "conventional methods" quickly and thoroughly. Humans (or posthumans with enough essential similarity for us to see as fit heirs https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2015-02-01 ) still get to find and occupy economic niches where the conventional method doesn't work so well. The kind of people who want to learn whatever skill will make them famous - baseball players and rock stars of https://wondermark.com/c/609/ - can do so by debugging those conventional methods within some field where enough people are dissatisfied by current AI performance. Leaderboard for sewage treatment plant maintenance (or whatever) then becomes the standard subsequent AIs imitate.
For niche creative fields, similar deal. Some people will be happy enough to find that what they want already exists, others get frustrated that so far it's only been loosely approximated, and will push on to finish the job, even if only for their own eccentric satisfaction rather than some rockstar-level bug bounty.
> Or not perfect, but better than anything that a human could've made.
Standing on the shoulders of giants doesn't mean there's nowhere left to climb. Seeing that something can be done imperfectly, some folks get all the more inspired to find and correct remaining flaws. http://www.thecodelesscode.com/case/107
I don't want to read some perfect book that nobody else has read. I want to read a good book that other people have read, so that I have that common language with them. Books are cultural Schelling points. At least for some.
This was something my partner and I quickly realized a year ago when he had ChatGPT write a story for him that he really liked, but then quickly realized wasn’t going to get distribution.
It’s really hard to know how distribution of these things will work - will it all just be random TikTok users who generate a book and then get their followers to read it and now it’s a bestseller?
> You have this really weird set of sci-fi preferences? Just feed them into an AI
You don't even need to do that. The AI already knows what you want better than you do. Hell, that's already the case today; even current-day algorithms are quite effective as long as you train them properly.
I think people will gradually lose interest in other humans altogether once AI is sufficiently advanced. Afterall, there'd be no way to even know who is a machine and who isn't, and your non-human friends could be optimized to be better friends: always there for you when you need them, very compatible with your personality, and perhaps designed to be less talented that you in some ways so you still feel valuable, while being highly talented in other areas.
You may be more interested in what your friends produce than some "better" song, but those friends may still be machines.
A singularity I'd wish for would be a type where everyone is completely self-sufficient. Then, capitalism might still be there, but only for those who wish to participate, and for the rest - ability to step away from the general dick-measuring contests, being able to survive comfortably in the bigger universe on one's own, with the social interaction being completely voluntary.
I think capitalism is interested in you, even if you are not interested in it. Before we get to settling other planets and the likes, the ultimate source of all wealth even in the "invest in investments in investing" economy will be possession of physical resources to make the chips and the homes and the food and the clothing (unless AI can literally create matter out of thin air, and even there, the atmosphere is not infinite to extract things out of).
So it will come down to "who owns this patch of land from which we get the resources for the AI to recombine into what we need and want?" and that will be governments or very rich private individuals. We may well go back to a society of aristocrats based on owning land, where Billy-Bob the farmer is now the Duke of Hazzard because his acres are the foundation of his and his family's wealth, just like being a Texas oil baron once upon a time.
That's why my wish in the event of singularity would be for a human upload, a Von Neumann probe that can carry my mind away, a little virtual reality of my own and no planets, thank you, gravity wells are for suckers who like to live crowded. All the physical resouces one would need then are on asteroids and such. Theoretically, it's fairly doable, too. And investment and economy? Fuck that, I'd rather invest in reaching autonomy.
There are a lot of us who would rather go away and leave anyone alone rather than attempt to dominate anyone (unless they're into that, of course). You have people trying to FIRE instead of become billionaires, in the financial realm.
Sadly, the wannabe-Big Men aren't going to let you do that.
A good objection, yeah. Though, there are some factors that would mitigate that issue - lots of available resources, good weapons, and the whole mentality that would want to go to space is rather different.
This is only really plausibly an issue if you're nowhere near the expansion frontier and most resources have already been mined out (and the systems already K2). Otherwise you're taking a fairly pointless risk given that asteroids are not a scarce commodity.
You're making assumptions about the minimum requirements. I expect that an interstellar vehicle will be SLOW. That planets will be uninhabitable without terraforming. And that people will want to have several companions during their lifetime. (Also that interstellar vehicles will be sufficiently comfortable that after living in one for over a thousand years one won't even WANT to live on a planet. Whether you put in that thousand years either as one person or as a few generations.)
What about violence?
From p. 82 of "Better Angels of Our Nature" by Steven Pinker:
"The journalist Steven Sailer recounts an exchange from early 20th-century England: “A hereditary member of the British House of Lords complained that Prime Minister Lloyd George had created new Lords solely because they were self-made millionaires who had only recently acquired large acreages. When asked, “How did your ancestor become a Lord?” he replied sternly, “With the battle-ax, sir, with the battle-ax!”"
The secret to being quoted in important books is poor sourcing: although that anecdote made a vivid impression upon me, I have no idea anymore where it’s from.
So, at the moment, I’m the best source!
EDIT: this was a Copilot hallucination. Please ignore.
The quote is from Sir Walter Scott's novel "Waverley," first published in 1814.
(This is why we have Copilot :) )
This is the first time I've seen one of those things be useful, you're a thaumaturge, Malcolm!
Hey, the level titles went out with 2nd edition.
Unless you were being sarcastic: You fell for a hallucination.
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/5998/pg5998.txt
It didn't even sound like Waverley.
And this is why I roll my eyes at any comment that starts with, "I asked ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini and this is what it had to say:," and then skip it. When reading a blog with a reasonably intelligent readership, these things are still _useless_ compared to the collective intelligence of other humans.
I understand from tech people that these can be very useful for automating basic code or bouncing ideas around for tricky problems, but for humanities, conversation, and actual worldly knowledge, they do nothing but spout cliches, flattery, and hallucinations.
It’s very useful if it gives you a supposed source, particularly if it does so when Google fails. Google can then let you check whether the source actually says it, but something with a 10-30% accuracy rate on sourcing quotes that Google can’t find is actually really valuable, since we already have the technology to check these quotes.
I suspect quotations are more challenging for LLMs because of the frequency of misattribution of quotes to famous people in the training data's source literature. Lincoln, Twain, and Churchill have slews of quotes misattributed to them.
Having said that, I find ChatGPT and CoPilot very useful for general writeups of subjects at an intro level. But I always ask the AI for links to references and double-check them. Chat and CoP are getting better — in the past, they both partially or completely hallucinated about 25% of the references. Nowadays, they're generally getting the references correct, but they frequently misstate or misunderstand the conclusions in the references. Caveat emptor.
Except a scan of Waverley reveals that it is not the source of the quote at all, simply the AI hallucinating. (Leaving as an exercise for the reader why we do indeed have Copilot)
Yes, I wondered if ought to check! Can't find it in Hansard either, but it's very fragmentary from that era.
Copilot is very useful to writing poems for my wife. Until I admitted the wording was Copilot's not mine :(
Imagine getting Cerano de Bergerac'd by a toaster.
I know. They ask for honesty then complain when they get it!
Rookie mistake, dude.
A good example of how AI slop and related problems are increasingly polluting high-quality human fora like ACX and LW2. Some people are still bothering to check or apply some critical thinking to LLM outputs... but for how long, as others keep freeriding on their efforts, taking the benefits of the implicit trust & credibility extended to human commenters while shirking effort and epistemic standards?
(Also, note the lack of critical thinking here, in addition to the laziness in not checking in a trivially available text. Why would a 20th century nonfiction anecdote about Lloyd George & newly-elevated rich peers to the British parliament be from an early 1800s novel by a novelist famous for romantic mythologizing writing about Scotland or medieval England? At the very least, this should make you wonder - even if it was true, and Sailer had badly distorted the anecdote, how could the LLM recognize the 'real' anecdote in a Scottish fantasy a century earlier?)
"Why would a 20th century nonfiction anecdote about Lloyd George & newly-elevated rich peers to the British parliament be from an early 1800s novel by a novelist famous for romantic mythologizing writing about Scotland or medieval England?"
Because in so many cases, quotes get mangled, reformatted, and attributed to sixteen different "So-and-so once said" as they get passed along.
So it's not out of all possible bounds that a quote from a novel got Chinese Whispers treatment of ending up being attributed to a hereditary peer under Lloyd George's government.
I'm disappointed that the attribution turns out to be false, so we still don't know where the original came from or who in fact said it, if it was said at all and not invented by somebody on the Internet.
> Because in so many cases, quotes get mangled, reformatted, and attributed to sixteen different
Indeed, hence my last sentence... It would be impressive enough for a LLM to be able to recount the source if the story were unmangled and recounted correctly; but to do so while it would have to be almost totally transformed? That's Radio Yerevan level inference.
I didn't bring this up, because this is unreasonable for an ordinary commenter to know this, and I was focusing on what is reasonable for an ordinary commenter to do or know. But the changes here are not just extremely implausible in their own right, they are also fairly implausible as a corrupted transformation of a plausible Walter Scott original: because they are too extensive, the wrong kinds, over a relatively short period of time (~1 century) for a writing-heavy culture, and against the selective pressure of a widely-read original correcting mutations. After tracking down hundreds of these sorts of things over the years, while quotes and stories do get mangled and transformed, if there was some version which was actually about a Scottish parliament admitting some new landlords (not businessmen buying estates) in the mid-1700s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waverley_(novel)#Plot) or earlier, to make it fit, this would be a pretty unusual case, because the putative original would have to be transformed in both time, place, *and* rationale, while the transforms are usually more like a single major corruption combined with simplification and dropping of details which undermine the moral of the story. So if I was investigating this quote, I would expect one of the time, place, or personage to be false and the exact battle-axe line probably a memetically-fitter version of a much clunkier Walter Scottian-style original; but for all 3 of them to be likely false, as implied by a _Waverly_ attribution, I would be highly skeptical.
It is not impossible, because wacky things can happen in the chain of transmission (I still remember the quote I was increasingly sure was completely fake until I manged to trace it to the splicing of 3 different quotes from 3 different books & 2 authors, which I still cannot explain), but I would definitely be looking very hard at anyone, much less a LLM, claiming that that Churchill story obviously came from _Waverly_. Because that is just not a plausible origin for an uncorrupted 'original'. It's too many, too large, mutations, over too short a time, diverging from a too-well known source.
Sorry guys! I didn't think it was sufficiently important to check. Usually I do.
And I did say it was from Copilot so you were free to make your own assessment.
As for it being mangled: absolutely and that's what LLM's are good at figuring out (sometimes, anyway!)
(By the way, no criticism, but I have to point out that Lloyd George has now morphed into Churchill!)
If you asked a knowledgable friend they might say "sounds a bit like Walter Scott's 'Waverley'", but Copilot arrogantly stated it as a fact. When I went back to check it admitted it didn't have access to the text due to copyright (despite it being well out of copyright with the full text on the web).
This is a perfect example of how quote distortion works. You've re-misattributed (mis-misattributed? meta-misattributed?) the OP's battle-axe quote to Churchill when the OP thought it was Lloyd George. The next time an LLM slurps up the ACX conversations, Churchill may come up as the quotee. LOL!
Don't worry about violence, Steve. The new AI Social Worker Response Drones (we'll have defunded the police successfully come the Singularity, you know) will be available 24/7 to pacify any undesirable anti-social behaviour with counselling, appropriate medication if required, and death rays.
Sorry, did I say 'death rays'? I meant of course MAID Mobile Units!
Oingo Boingo had this all figured out a while ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qo30hYkJWzc
Didn't the cannons used to be marked 'the last argument of kings'?
I totally agree--a lot of the way this plays out in the real world tends to be ignored. These 'decentralized networks' still tend to have heavy, bulky, expensive points of failure. What if some government or rebel group starts blowing up datacenters?
Yes, in France under the Ancien Régime: ultima ratio regum. I saw one with this inscription in a museum, I think probably the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin.
There are a bunch floating around Europe, I assume because of the Napoleonic Wars. Obviously the Musée de l'Armée in Paris has entire rows of old cannon with that motto, but I also saw a few at the Kriegsmuseum in Vienna (along with numerous other cannon with mottos, heraldic images, some Arabic calligraphy courtesy of the Turks...).
I would be in favor of putting coats of arms and cool mottos on our war materiel again, not gonna lie. Surely our machine civilization can manage this much?
Presumably the rebel group gets wiped out by a swarm of drones. If it's a government we're back to the question Scott raises in the post of whether the AIs (which control the drones) answer to the government ahead of the companies that made them.
I wonder if the distant origin of the story is an anecdote from the Quo warranto hearings conducted in England under Edward I. Quo warranto was a legal process that inquired "by what right" [literally, "warrant"] a given claim (to a specific right, as to judge tenants in a manorial court, or the right to collect some form or forms of rent on a piece of land, etc.) was held. Typically, it asked claimants to produce a document by which the claim had been granted (typically, again, by the king). Supposedly the Earl of Warenne responded by marching into the court and slamming a rusty sword down on the desk where the clerks were writing, while exclaiming something like, "I hold by THIS right"! According to the story, the sword had been wielded by the earl's ancestor, who had ridden with William the Conqueror. The tale is recounted and discussed in ch. 1 of Michael Clanchy's excellent From Memory to Written Record. England 1066-1307.
Reminds me of this classic image: https://external-preview.redd.it/G6Z95HYuWQqjbBU_owT0qmtN1iILkE0M3MK86M3TaTI.jpg?auto=webp&s=eade9ab5b1800ae8e118f4087d27152c13dee533
Quotes and provenance thereof aside, this is indeed the elephant in the room. I would like Scott to write a whole new post addressing violence and the post-singularity; or even post GPT 5, response to it.
For what it’s worth, Steve, your writing’s had an enormous influence on my understanding of the world and its inhabitants for which I’m eternally grateful.
Many decades from now, I expect you’ll be vindicated in the scientific landscape. Until then, know that there are voices out there less brave than yours who appreciate your academic martyrdom. You’re on the right side of history, I believe that earnestly.
"None of these things happen, and non-plutocrats are stuck on Earth while the plutocrats colonize the galaxy. It doesn’t make sense for 3,000 people to colonize the galaxy on their own, so they will need some source of colonists. If they don’t use poor people, then whom?"
-- maybe there could be some sort of Bobiverse-like scenario where the plutocrats create many copies of their own uploaded minds.
We aren't going to "colonize the galaxy" barring some inconceivable new physics discoveries. The velocity of light is going to remain the universe's speed limit and that will keep us in our own solar system indefinitely. I'd give more likely odds to our learning how to travel between Earths in alternate timelines and colonizing those where humans did not evolve (but are still friendly to our type of life).
If stars are on average 10 LY apart, speed is 0.1 c and it takes 1000 years after arriving at a star to build new probes, then it would take about 10 million years to colonise the galaxy, which is bugger all time in cosmic terms.
Yes. You and me might not colonise the galaxy, but either humanity or whatever replaces humanity will, if they continue to exist at all.
Very likely. Life is grabby.
The singularity isn't magic, you would still require a certain amount of energy to accelerate an object of certain mass (and decelerate it at the other end of the trip) which is enormous. You'd have to be converting and storing the lifetime energy output of several stars, I doubt any technological breakthrough is going to enable this. And at those velocities, even a tiny little space pebble would demolish you. Neither human bodies nor physical databanks are going to travel between the stars.
If humans are replaced by machines, the machines may well end up slinging around radio messages across the galaxy until heat death arrives. Maybe they manage to replicate themselves on some other planet by showing a scientist there how to create a copy and then kill all the original inhabitants of that planet too. I guess that's colonization.
10% light speed, means that the kinetic energy is about the same as the fusion energy of hydrogen. That means, for every ton of space ship, you need a ton of hydrogen to fuse.
Uranium isn't quite as energy dense, but isn't far off.
This means that even if you sent the whole earth, you would still be using a tiny fraction of the suns total output.
A gigawatt nuclear reactor running for 30 years gives enough energy to get a 1 ton spacecraft up to 10% light speed.
How heavy does an interstellar spacecraft need to be? Can we send a single nanobot and get it to build a radio receiver when it lands?
This. Cjw is wrong by more than sixteen orders of magnitude. WP on the Sun contains the sentence:
> Every second, the Sun's core fuses about 600 billion kilograms (kg) of hydrogen into helium and converts 4 billion kg of matter into energy.
Rule of thumb, converting 1kg of matter will provide the energy to accelerate another kilogram to a pretty decent relativistic velocity, certainly more than 0.1c. So our local modest Sol could power one 4 million ton spaceship per second.
Heck, with the energy harvested in 50 million years -- still much shorted than the lifetime of our sun -- we could send Earth itself as a relativistic spaceship.
The problem is not energy, and never has been energy. The problem is the tyranny of the rocket equation. Even fusion power will give you limited exhaust velocities well below c. That being said, travelling at 0.01c will not take that much longer, either.
I appreciate the correction, I had mixed that up in my head with a discussion of a different interstellar travel method. Still it seems that couldn't be right for ships going to a fixed destination, because a 2nd ton of fuel would have to go with you to decelerate at the other end, and that ton of fuel would also require a ton of fuel to accelerate at the outset, adjusting for spent fuel reducing the mass over time. But I accept that it's better, obviously you can go a bit slower and make it work out, and 10000 years vs 20000 years may not matter (although maybe it does? I don't know what sorts of material components would be required and there'd have to be oxygen so the internal components wouldn't be in a vacuum.)
Supposing you could manage this, it's still a non-trivial amount of energy, you would need a pretty darn good idea where you were going to make it worthwhile. We certainly haven't gotten any information yet about other habitable planets that would be good enough to justify trying such a trip. And I can't really see much point in it, too far away for trade, most of your descendants will live and die on a ship, when you get there whoop-de-doo you're on another planet, so what? About the only justification I could imagine is to get *away* from something on Earth, say to escape the ASI if you could somehow ensure no copies of it snuck aboard, and it wouldn't really matter in that case whether there was a destination.
If all you had to do was send out lightweight Voyagers that didn't need to decelerate, that seems plausible. Good enough perhaps for the ASI to replicate itself after taking over Earth, but not gonna do much for us.
You can very well colonise at 0.1% the speed of light. You can still get the whole galaxy in a cosmic blip.
I think if it was about machines there would be ways. Like create miniaturized swarms of tiny robots with all the requisite data to start up a local building centre and sling those at high speeds, accepting that a X% will not make it - as long as enough do.
But humans is another story. We have very specific mass, temperature, maximum acceleration etc. requirements to be transported somewhere and reach it alive. And those requirements, combined with the rules of relativity, are forbidding. The engineering of it is a nightmare and it's very well possible that human interstellar travel might simply be not doable.
I think 0.1c is a bit fast. Also I've got an opinion that folks who have lived for a thousand years in a generation ship will want to continue living in the generation ship, and will just build multiple new ones when they reach a rich source of materials.
After such a journey, the prospect of reaching a planet to live on will have taken on a deeply religious significance. If the planet they reached turns out to be inviting enough in practical terms, there would be more than enough people wanting to stay to give them a chance as a colony.
Some will probably stay and some will move on.
I’d still call that colonizing the galaxy.
Well, so would I. But those civilizations still planet-bound probably wouldn't notice.
You're assuming that every star has planets that can support life and provide raw materials for further colonization. That is not the case. Even at the more optimistic levels of predictions most stars will not offer a suitable environment. And you're also forgetting something else: entropy. Nothing is immortal, certainly not any machine we humans create or ever will. Nor us humans either.
The answer to Fermi's purported paradox really is that simple: the universe is too vast, the distances too great and Time is too brutal a tyrant over all physical matter. Whatever wonders we achieve they will be achieved locally only
Though do note the one little proviso I did allow-- there may many Earths and perhaps we can find others suitable for ourselves across the vast otherness of Elsewhere.
“You're assuming that every star has planets that can support life” — no I’m not. I’m assuming raw materials, but these could be in the form of asteroids or lifeless planets.
When we colonise the universe, if we do, it’ll very likely be as uploaded minds, since squishy humans are inefficient in space.
“And you're also forgetting something else: entropy. Nothing is immortal, certainly not any machine we humans create or ever will. Nor us humans either.“ — yes the posthumans that colonise the universe will change over time. Of course they will.
This is not accurate. Life is not a real-valued field that can diffuse even through potential barriers that cause it to attenuate exponentially and then simply replenish itself whenever it encounters favourable conditions. If the barrier is harsh enough, it is entirely possible for there to be a significant non-zero (even a ~1) probability that no lifeform will ever cross it, no matter how hard they try, before the Sun goes nova and we all die anyway.
It is absolutely an option that colonizing the galaxy is fundamentally impossible for all practical purposes. Or that it is impossible for us because we were born in an area of the galaxy and in a solar system where we simply don't have the necessary jumping points and resources to do so. Maybe somewhere else near the nucleus of the Milky Way there is a civilization who has a second habitable but empty planet in their own star system and another star only 0.2 LY away and they are much better positioned to learn the basics of space colonization than us, whose closest options in the Goldilocks zone are a barren satellite, a barely less barren planet, and the worst hellhole you could possibly imagine.
What makes the physical impossibility of reaching alternate timelines more likely to be proven false by some new discovery than the impossibility of faster than light travel? If the other worlds are based on the many-world interpretation, we're forbidden from reaching them by the linearity of the Hamiltonian which, though perhaps more obscure than the speed of light limit, is much more fundamental. If it's the version of multiverses from eternal inflation or the string theory landscape or something, those would literally just be other locations, far farther away than the rest of the galaxy. If it's some sort of time travel thing, time travel being possible implies FTL is.
Elsewhere is not governed the same physical laws as four dimensional universes like ours. It isn't even governed by the same geometry, possibly not by the scale arithmetic.
Even if such places exist, you would still need to get there first before you can take advantage of whatever weird physics you may find there.
You may be interested in Eternity in six hours: intergalactic spreading of
intelligent life and sharpening the Fermi paradox by Stuart Armstrong and Anders Sandberg: https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/intergalactic-spreading.pdf
Was going to post this; thanks for doing it for me :-)
I'm a bit annoyed that your paper with Sandberg was published over a decade ago and most discourse around this topic is still at this level. The main knock on the Fermi paradox for me is Sandberg et al's dissolution of it via incorporating parameter uncertainty, but it felt really nice for me to know from reading your paper that known physics & engineering don't present an insurmountable obstacle to us spreading across the galaxies in due course. Anyhow, thanks for writing it! :)
Why not? We could send up frozen embryos and artificial wombs. That would sure take a couple millenia, but who cares?
If you can solve death, galactic colonization is pretty easy. You just sleep through the journey. This is why I'm always annoyed by the fixation on FTL travel, it's probably impossible & not remotely necessary.
Solving death is as nonsensical as solving entropy (of which death is really just a biological manifestation).
I think you're being pedantic here and ignoring the substantive point. 'Death' of course comes for everyone, but there's an enormous practical difference between that and the reality of senescence, which is not required by physics. A lifespan of 100,000 years is more than sufficient to achieve whatever colonization goals a person wants, and really there's no reason to say that 100,000 couldn't become 1,000,000.
Entropy can be locally reduced as long as it is increased in the global system -- i.e., there is no physical contradiction with extending life using energy/matter inputs from the broader world.
Beating the current 100 meter dash world record is like breaking through the lightspeed barrier.
The entire model of "space colonization" you're imagining here seems to be some sort of unrealistic Star Trek style scenario based heavily on historical naval exploration. What you need to realize is that this is exactly backwards, it's actually airless rocks that are the best candidate for colonization precisely because they're easy for space industry to get stuff to and from.
In reality at a certain tech level nearly every icy rock is a good candidate for colonization because all you need is energy (in the form of fission and/or fusion fuel) and raw materials. So in reality we don't need to build anything like generation ships to colonize other stars: Rather civilization could sprawl outwards colonizing countless icy bodies until this outwards sprawl hits another stars Oort cloud and then work inwards gradually from there.
Granted there are other faster means of colonization. However, even in a very pessimistic scenario you can still colonize the galaxy, just not at relativistic speed.
Why poor people, unless you want the pleasure of being a Russian aristocrat with a raft of serfs of your very own? Much more efficient and sensible to send out colony ships full of robots which can self-assemble on site, do the physical work of setting up the base, get the local version of an AI up and running, and then the pleasure domes will be all operating awaiting the arrival of the plutocrats.
Think Asimov's Solarians, from his Robot series:
"Inhabited by Spacer descendants, Solaria is the fiftieth and last Spacer World settled in the first wave of interstellar settlement. It was occupied from approximately 4627 AD by inhabitants of the neighboring world Nexon, originally for summer homes. ...The Solarians specialized in the construction of robots, which they exported to the other Spacer Worlds. Solarian robots were noted for their variety and excellence.
...Originally, there were about 20,000 people living in vast estates individually or as married couples. There were thousands of robots for every Solarian. Almost all of the work and manufacturing was conducted by robots. The population was kept stable through strict birth and immigration controls. In the era of Robots and Empire, no more than five thousand Solarians were known to remain. Twenty thousand years later, the population was twelve hundred, with just one human per estate."
I'm not sure why the plutocrats would put up with strict birth controls?
Part of being a Solarian is not wanting to be around people, so rich people in such a culture don't want a lot of children.
In the Robot novels, there were a few reasons. One was that Asimov (and therefore also his in-universe politicians and economic planners) believed in Malthusian population economics, that per capita access to natural resources was the limiting factor for prosperity. So before the Settler era (starting towards the end of the Robot novels), everyone practiced population control to prevent standard of living from declining.
For the Solarians in particular, there was an extreme cultural aversion to being in the physical presence of another human, with even marital relations seen as an unpleasant duty. All social contact took place through holographic zoom calls. The backstory was that they'd spread out so much that in-person contact became first unfamiliar and uncomfortable and later a violation of privacy taboos. And also there was a self-selection effect where Solarians who didn't like the Solarians lifestyle fucked off to Aurora or another Spacer world where people did actually see one another in person from time to time. So the Solarians that remained took extreme measures to make sure that their planet remained uncrowded enough to sustain their lifestyle.
The Spacers also have a backstory of practicing Nazi-esque eugenics that was only just starting to mellow when the novels begin. They had strict rules against immigrants who didn't match their ideal (back when they still took immigrants from Earth at all) and had eugenics-based licensing for having kids, complete with mandatory killing of "defective" children. This is mentioned in passing in Caves of Steel and Robots of Dawn, and is a central theme of the novella Mother Earth.
"The backstory was that they'd spread out so much that in-person contact became first unfamiliar and uncomfortable and later a violation of privacy taboos."
Yes, and if I'm remembering correctly, all the child-raising was done by robots, so Solarians grew up unaccustomed to physical contact with other humans. To the extent that one of them nearly gets physically ill when in a room with the detective from Earth who talks about meeting "face-to-face", which reminds our Solarian that he's actually breathing the same air as another human in the room with him, meaning that some of what he's inhaling has been exhaled by the other person. This is about as disgusting to him as considering licking up someone's saliva would be to us.
I re-read the books recently, and that's a good highlights reel. The robot creche had a few plot points in it, not least the Shenandoah around the First and Second Laws required to get robot caretaker to discipline their charge.
Solarians reactions to Bailey insisting on in-person conversations ranged from "kinda into it, in an ashamed kinky way" to "prepared to literally commit suicide if he thinks there's another human about to enter his house", with the spit-licking reaction being pretty close to the median.
> Solarians reactions to Bailey insisting on in-person conversations ranged from "kinda into it, in an ashamed kinky way" to "prepared to literally commit suicide if he thinks there's another human about to enter his house"
literally me fr
That is in “Foundation and Earth” as well when they’re searching the Spacer planets to find earth. The Solarians at that point have lobes to telepathically control energy and compete between their estates for stuff like having the best apples for prestige.
I thought of this part reading the article too.
We already have people penning plaints about fertility decline and the boys over at The Motte discussing ways to reverse this (mainly by treating women like cattle, and I'm a freakin' small-t traditional Catholic with socially conservative views, so imagine how hardline dumb their suggestions have to be, to alienate *me*).
Very rich people won't necessarily want or need to have sixteen kids (Elon is an outlier here, bless the guy). If they can just interact with their peers on their luxury estates, insulated from the mass of the grubby proles who follow their every moment online, with super-efficient AI to run everything for them and all their whims catered to by luxury better-than-human servant robots, why would they fill up their luxury world with more people than whatever is considered the optimum? If they have to split off parts of their estate for their children to inherit, then by the social status games that are being put forward as replacement for human striving, the one that loses the most land/holdings divvying it up between four kids, as against the person who has only one or even no children, loses out. And losing out is going to sting even harder, in a society where ultra-mega-super conspicuous possession of resources is what marks you out as the crème de la crème.
Maybe if you can send your sprogs off-world to settle their *own* luxury gated community world, then the plutocrats will have kids. But exclusivity is the name of the game, and having tens or hundreds of millions crowding up your summer homes planet isn't on the to-do list.
Remember Martha's Vineyard and the immigrants? How many of the summer residents happily opened up their vacant holiday homes there?
Give it time.
If there is ONE billionaire who wants or needs children, and his children take after him in part, he's going to be the future.
It’s really easy to have kids as a rich person or a poor person. The middle class is who gets screwed by the costs, sets you back at least one subclass, I’m a lawyer and would’ve been living like a first year school teacher or entry level office worker if I’d had children. The poor are already poor and get subsidized and have little to do anyhow, and the rich can either indulge it or hire nannies, but the middle class has to actually work and then be in child duty all night and pay the full balance due.
I always wanted a serf, but can't find any at any Walmart, whether Hardware, Gardening, or clothing departments.
Have you tried Home Despot?
In the old days, I used to get mine at Blood Bath and Beyond, but that's no longer a going concern.
They typically keep them behind the counters. You have to ask for them by name.
I'm sure that you've heard the common complaint that you just can't get the help nowadays. Particularly when nearly all purchasing has moved to online shopping, and you can't trust those dropshippers to actually have what you want in stock and deliver it as ordered.
You need to be careful that they aren't confused about you asking for one of these:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bennett_Cerf
"Much more efficient and sensible to send out colony ships full of robots which can self-assemble on site, do the physical work of setting up the base, get the local version of an AI up and running, and then the pleasure domes will be all operating awaiting the arrival of the plutocrats."
Agreed. Likewise, the first manned Mars mission will be preceded by an unmanned mission that drops off supplies, structures, and robots at the landing site.
Re: Much more efficient and sensible to send out colony ships full of robots which can self-assemble on site
They will break down, as will such a shop, long before it gets anywhere useful. Again: Second Law of Thermodynamics. And such a ship would be a closed system, unlike the Earth which is constantly receiving energy from the sun. Apart from chaotic radiation (much more likely to do harm than good) and swarms upon swarms of neutrinos which seldom deign to interact with ordinary matter, there's nothing out there for vast distances.
It is already true that there are many actual human beings who are better poets, philosophers, singers, etc. than anyone I actually know, but I am still interested in their poetry, thoughts, and songs (voices)--that is, in the work of people I know. The whole idea that "better" is the only standard of interest is actually rather odd. It's not even clear what it means. Better to whom? For what purpose? For the purpose of knowing what someone else thinks or wants to express?
I don't think any of this will ever happen, but if it does, then life will not lack interest merely because a machine can produce what someone thinks is a "better" song.
I think there probably is some sort of objective artistic quality in the sense some people are more attractive than others (human preferences are correlated), though damned if I can tell you what it is.
The older I get, and perhaps the more sophisticated the attempts at maximizing perfection, the more I value amateur attempts over professional. Watching some professional sports is actually really boring. The absolute best at each sport have so perfected their techniques that the games all go a certain way, forced by the meta of the sport.
And I don't think I'm the only one feeling this. College football is quite popular. Even high school football has a pretty big following, beyond the families of the players. I would definitely rather play a sport myself or watch a family member play than watch a professional game.
I also value my children's drawings and musical performances better than professional. This one is different than sports, because I do value professional more than other people's amateur attempts, but still less than people close to me.
Maybe we need more difficult sports so that even the best athletes aren't boringly perfect at them.
One possibility is the sport including a random factor at short notice, like a cooking show.
I've joked about a meta-Olympic event: on the day of the competition, one event is chosen at random from all Olympic events, and the previously chosen athletes them have to compete against each other in that event with very little time to prepare. What kind of person do you send to compete in something like that?
My prediction is that for anything that looks like a sport, almost any professional athlete will have a massive advantage over almost anyone else.
You invent some completely new sport that isn't very similar to anything anyone has ever played before. You expose 100 people to it, 99 normal people in reasonable health and fitness, one guy who warms the bench of a not-very-good NBA team. I think in almost all cases, the NBA benchwarmer will be the best player of the 100 within a few days of everyone being exposed to the game, and probably the best player by a big margin. Because while there are specific skills you need to be an NBA player (shooting, setting screens, boxing out, handling the ball, etc.), a lot of what you need is general atheticism--fast reflexes, strength, endurance, good eye-hand coordination, good physical intuitions for where a ball/puck/frisbee/birdie will go, etc. And the NBA benchwarmer will have all of those in spades, or he would not even be on the bench of that team.
That still leaves open a lot of questions about what type of athlete to send, though. A weightlifter and a marathon runner have very different builds; what does the optimal 'jack-of-all-trades' athlete look like?
I literally last evening saw a commercial for a cooking show in which the chefs are each dealt a random card saying something like "no salt" or "you can't taste-test it as you're making it".
https://www.foodnetwork.com/shows/wildcard-kitchen
Do you like sports? I just figure the people who should decide what sports should be like are people who actually like sports
Rollerball?
In competitive Age of Empires 2 (bear with me) there is a system for players to pick the civilisations they will play but tournaments have started adding random bans at the start of each match, so players cannot fully plan in advance and audiences will see different civilisations played. The maps are also procedurally generated but not identical each time (unlike those in some other competitively played Real Time Strategy games such as Starcraft) so that players have to scout and adapt in each game.
I still find interesting how the meta changes over time in these games (whether NBA or NFL), and how nobody really plays the exact same way (due to things like players getting injured or player uniqueness), but I do agree that there's much higher variance at the amateur levels. For chess I'd agree with you, and consider 960 / Fischer random chess and Armageddon-style tournament formats a breath of fresh air.
That's why Bronze League Heroes in Starcraft 2 is a banger series. No meta, only two people struggling hard with the controls.
The game I am currently hooked on, Beyond All Reason, desperately needs this. Enforcement of its multiplayer meta has become so childish and unpleasant that it risks strangling an excellent title at birth by stalling the recruitment of new players. (The game's subreddit is currently consumed by argument over whether or not that has already irrevocably happened.)
The developers say that BAR (as it's called) will soon get a matchmaking function of some kind, such that players can quickly/easily find matches at their individual or team player-rating level. Hasn't arrived yet so we dunno whether or how well that will work. If it does work then one of the first effects hopefully will be to allow new/learning players to play and learn in peace vs each other, thereby encouraging them to stick with it despite the game's steep competitive learning curve. The developers have an agreement for release of the game on Steam and it may be that they won't go through with that without the matchmaking feature.
If the matchmaking could in some way undermine BAR's rigid meta that would also be great in my view. Random-generated game maps would have some of that effect; but that feature would be a serious programming lift for a game of BAR's complexity so I don't expect it.
Watching good games of that I often have a strong feeling that it is the real game, and what pros play is some stunted offshoot. Not only is the range of viable strategies narrower at elite level, but players don't get much opportunity to problem-solve in-game. You mostly need to be prepping the counter before an attack hits or it's too late, so all the theorycrafting and experimentation has to take place outside the competitive games.
I can't define it, but I know it when I see it.
I am generally not interested in bad media. The way subpar media still has its place is by occupying niches - there might be a lot of great poets, but only this one writes about this specific topic that really speaks to me. There might be a lot of great movies, but only this one touched the idea that I think is really fun. Here, occupying the niche compensates for lesser quality.
In the age of AI, niches would evaporate. Regardless of what niche it is, an AI would do a better job than a human would, and they would be able to do it on the fly. You have this really weird set of sci-fi preferences? Just feed them into an AI and receive your perfect book. Or not perfect, but better than anything that a human could've made.
The only fleeing hope for the artists is that there will be a significant movement for non-AI media, and ways to reliably detect AI generated stuff.
I think there's an at least vaguely plausible scenario where AI never really gets "better than the best" compared to humans, just better at applying "conventional methods" quickly and thoroughly. Humans (or posthumans with enough essential similarity for us to see as fit heirs https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2015-02-01 ) still get to find and occupy economic niches where the conventional method doesn't work so well. The kind of people who want to learn whatever skill will make them famous - baseball players and rock stars of https://wondermark.com/c/609/ - can do so by debugging those conventional methods within some field where enough people are dissatisfied by current AI performance. Leaderboard for sewage treatment plant maintenance (or whatever) then becomes the standard subsequent AIs imitate.
For niche creative fields, similar deal. Some people will be happy enough to find that what they want already exists, others get frustrated that so far it's only been loosely approximated, and will push on to finish the job, even if only for their own eccentric satisfaction rather than some rockstar-level bug bounty.
> Or not perfect, but better than anything that a human could've made.
Standing on the shoulders of giants doesn't mean there's nowhere left to climb. Seeing that something can be done imperfectly, some folks get all the more inspired to find and correct remaining flaws. http://www.thecodelesscode.com/case/107
http://www.thecodelesscode.com/case/122
I don't want to read some perfect book that nobody else has read. I want to read a good book that other people have read, so that I have that common language with them. Books are cultural Schelling points. At least for some.
This was something my partner and I quickly realized a year ago when he had ChatGPT write a story for him that he really liked, but then quickly realized wasn’t going to get distribution.
It’s really hard to know how distribution of these things will work - will it all just be random TikTok users who generate a book and then get their followers to read it and now it’s a bestseller?
> You have this really weird set of sci-fi preferences? Just feed them into an AI
You don't even need to do that. The AI already knows what you want better than you do. Hell, that's already the case today; even current-day algorithms are quite effective as long as you train them properly.
This feels like a wild exaggeration based on my interactions with every content algorithm ever.
I think people will gradually lose interest in other humans altogether once AI is sufficiently advanced. Afterall, there'd be no way to even know who is a machine and who isn't, and your non-human friends could be optimized to be better friends: always there for you when you need them, very compatible with your personality, and perhaps designed to be less talented that you in some ways so you still feel valuable, while being highly talented in other areas.
You may be more interested in what your friends produce than some "better" song, but those friends may still be machines.
People still play chess ffs!
A singularity I'd wish for would be a type where everyone is completely self-sufficient. Then, capitalism might still be there, but only for those who wish to participate, and for the rest - ability to step away from the general dick-measuring contests, being able to survive comfortably in the bigger universe on one's own, with the social interaction being completely voluntary.
I think capitalism is interested in you, even if you are not interested in it. Before we get to settling other planets and the likes, the ultimate source of all wealth even in the "invest in investments in investing" economy will be possession of physical resources to make the chips and the homes and the food and the clothing (unless AI can literally create matter out of thin air, and even there, the atmosphere is not infinite to extract things out of).
So it will come down to "who owns this patch of land from which we get the resources for the AI to recombine into what we need and want?" and that will be governments or very rich private individuals. We may well go back to a society of aristocrats based on owning land, where Billy-Bob the farmer is now the Duke of Hazzard because his acres are the foundation of his and his family's wealth, just like being a Texas oil baron once upon a time.
That's why my wish in the event of singularity would be for a human upload, a Von Neumann probe that can carry my mind away, a little virtual reality of my own and no planets, thank you, gravity wells are for suckers who like to live crowded. All the physical resouces one would need then are on asteroids and such. Theoretically, it's fairly doable, too. And investment and economy? Fuck that, I'd rather invest in reaching autonomy.
There are a lot of us who would rather go away and leave anyone alone rather than attempt to dominate anyone (unless they're into that, of course). You have people trying to FIRE instead of become billionaires, in the financial realm.
Sadly, the wannabe-Big Men aren't going to let you do that.
If serious space expansion ever happens - it's fairly inevitable that someone will escape and reach autonomy, after that, no limits.
Good luck, my friend. Bon voyage.
Until somebody else's VNM probe looks at yours and sees a harvestable asteroid.
A good objection, yeah. Though, there are some factors that would mitigate that issue - lots of available resources, good weapons, and the whole mentality that would want to go to space is rather different.
This is only really plausibly an issue if you're nowhere near the expansion frontier and most resources have already been mined out (and the systems already K2). Otherwise you're taking a fairly pointless risk given that asteroids are not a scarce commodity.
You're making assumptions about the minimum requirements. I expect that an interstellar vehicle will be SLOW. That planets will be uninhabitable without terraforming. And that people will want to have several companions during their lifetime. (Also that interstellar vehicles will be sufficiently comfortable that after living in one for over a thousand years one won't even WANT to live on a planet. Whether you put in that thousand years either as one person or as a few generations.)