My new interview with Robin Hanson on the Great Filter - a rather elegant, if not disturbing, solution to the Fermi Paradox. Hanson suggests that theres some kind hurdle thats preventing life from advancing to the stage where it can go interstellar. Theres something out there, says Hanson, thats preventing dead matter from giving rise, in time, to expanding lasting life. overcomingbias/2014/07/adam-ford-i-on-great-filter.html We have three main sources of info on existential risks (xrisks): 1 Inside View Analysis – where we try to use our best theories to reason about particular causal processes. 2 Earth Track Records – the empirical distribution of related events observed so far on Earth. 3 The Great Filter – inferences from the fact that the universe looks dead everywhere but here. These sources are roughly equally informative. #2 suggests xrisks are low, even if high enough to deserve much effort to prevent them. I’d say that most variations on #1 suggest the same. However, #3 suggests xrisks could be very high, which should encourage more xrisk-mitigation efforts. Ironically most xrisk efforts (of which I’m aware) focus on AI-risk, which can’t explain the great filter. Most analysis efforts also focus on #1, less on #2, and almost none on #3. https://youtube/watch?v=zGXpsJYNILg Whats the worst that could happen? - 16 years ago Robin Hanson said: “Humanity seems to have a bright future, i.e., a non-trivial chance of expanding to fill the universe with lasting life. But the fact that space near us seems dead now tells us that any given piece of dead matter faces an astronomically low chance of begating such a future. There thus exists a great filter between death and expanding lasting life, and humanity faces the ominous question: how far along this filter are we?” : hanson.gmu.edu/greatfilter.html
Posted on: Thu, 31 Jul 2014 00:45:34 +0000