Skeptical Scientists Urge World To ‘Have the Courage to Do Nothing' At UN Conference

[Geronimo]

Originally posted by Aeson


That would be mean to parasites and cancers... they don't know better

What I meant is simply that we can draw analogies between the effects humanity has on environments to effects parasites have.

I'll agree so long as it's clear that the effects are not intrinsic to the species.

There's nothing meaningfully parasitic about humans biologically, ie as a species.

Heck, given that technologically sophisticated sustainable civilizations are theoretically possible I don't even think it would be correct to describe technologically adept civilization as parasitic without specifying non sustainable civilizations.

Humans are parasites/cancers is way off because it then sounds as if parasitism is a property of being human.

[Blake]

Now more on intrinsic value and the danger of fitness at expansion justifying expansion...

A while ago I read about Existential Risks, in particular this article, and I'll quote a section here, that is, on the possibility that the "cosmic commons" will be burnt up in a colonization race.

7.1 Our potential or even our core values are eroded by evolutionary development

This scenario is conceptually more complicated than the other existential risks we have considered (together perhaps with the “We are living in a simulation that gets shut down” bang scenario). It is explored in more detail in a companion paper [61]. An outline of that paper is provided in an Appendix.

A related scenario is described in [62], which argues that our “cosmic commons” could be burnt up in a colonization race. Selection would favor those replicators that spend all their resources on sending out further colonization probes [63].

Although the time it would take for a whimper of this kind to play itself out may be relatively long, it could still have important policy implications because near-term choices may determine whether we will go down a track [64] that inevitably leads to this outcome. Once the evolutionary process is set in motion or a cosmic colonization race begun, it could prove difficult or impossible to halt it [65]. It may well be that the only feasible way of avoiding a whimper is to prevent these chains of events from ever starting to unwind.

...

Appendix: The outline of an evolutionary whimper

This appendix outlines why there is a risk that we may end in an evolutionary whimper. The following eleven-links chain of reasoning is not intended to be a rigorous proof of any kind but rather something like a suggestive narrative minus literary embellishments. (For a fuller discussion of some of these ideas, see [61].)

1. Although it’s easy to think of evolution as leading from simple to more complex life forms, we should not uncritically assume that this is always so. It is true that here on Earth, simple replicators have evolved to human beings (among other things), but because of an observation selection effect the evidential value of this single data point is very limited (more on this in the section on estimating the probability of existential risks).

2. We don’t currently see much evolutionary development in the human species. This is because biological evolution operates on a time-scale of many generations, not because it doesn’t occur any longer [103].

3. Biological human evolution is slow primarily because of the slowness of human reproduction (with a minimum generational lag of about one and a half decade).

4. Uploads and machine intelligences can reproduce virtually instantaneously, provided easy resources are available. Also, if they can predict some aspects of their evolution, they can modify themselves accordingly right away rather than waiting to be outcompeted. Both these factors can lead to a much more rapid evolutionary development in a posthuman world.

5. The activities and ways of being to which we attach value may not coincide with the activities that have the highest economic value in the posthuman world. Agents who choose to devote some fraction of their resources to (unproductive or less-than-optimally productive) “hobbies” would be at a competitive disadvantage, and would therefore risk being outcompeted. (So how could play evolve in humans and other primates? Presumably because it was adaptive and hence “productive” in the sense of the word used here. We place a value on play. But the danger consists in there being no guarantee that the activities that are adaptive in the future will be ones that we would currently regard as valuable – the adaptive activities of the future may not even be associated with any consciousness.)

6. We need to distinguish between two senses of “outcompeted”. In the first sense, an outcompeted type is outcompeted only in a relative sense: the resources it possesses constitutes a smaller and smaller fraction of the total of colonized resources as time passes. In the second sense, an outcompeted type’s possessions decrease in absolute terms so that the type eventually becomes extinct.

7. If property rights were nearly perfectly enforced (over cosmic distances, which seems hard to do) then the “hobbyists” (those types that devote some of their resources on activities that are unproductive) would be outcompeted only in the first sense. Depending on the details, this may or may not qualify as a whimper. If the lost potential (due to the increasing dominance of types that we don’t regard as valuable) were great enough, it would be a whimper.

8. Without nearly perfect enforcement of property rights, we would have to fear that the hobbyists would become extinct because they are less efficient competitors for the same ecological niche than those types which don’t expend any of their resources on hobbyist activities.

9. The only way of avoiding this outcome may be to replace natural evolution with directed evolution, i.e. by shaping the social selection pressures so that they favor the hobbyist type (by, for example, taxing the non-hobbyists) [19,104]. This could make the hobbyist type competitive.

10. Directed evolution, however, requires coordination. It is no good if some societies decide to favor their hobbyists if there are other societies that instead decide to maximize their productivity by not spending anything on subsidizing hobbyists. For the latter would then eventually outcompete the former. Therefore, the only way that directed evolution could avoid what would otherwise be a fated evolutionary whimper may be if there is on the highest level of organization only one independent agent. We can call such an organization a singleton.

11. A singleton does not need to be a monolith. It can contain within itself a highly diverse ecology of independent groups and individuals. A singleton could for example be a democratic world government or a friendly superintelligence

The idea of the universe being consumed by those which devote ALL their efforts towards expansion, is a disturbing one.

[Geronimo]

Originally posted by Blake
Now more on intrinsic value and the danger of fitness at expansion justifying expansion...

A while ago I read about Existential Risks, in particular this article, and I'll quote a section here, that is, on the possibility that the "cosmic commons" will be burnt up in a colonization race.



...



The idea of the universe being consumed by those which devote ALL their efforts towards expansion, is a disturbing one.

I suppose this applies most of all to transhumanist societies. Given time they would modify themselves to take pleasure from all "practical" (non "hobby") activity and would therefore "waste" no time on unproductive activity. This would probably lead only to reproduction or resource monopolization as the only activities they would engage in directly or indirectly. Maybe they'd be happy but they sure would seem alien and depressing as a civilization from my limited human perspective.