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Comment by noduerme | Hacker News Reader

It's not really an infamy against our species. Generally speaking, any two species in the same area need to occupy different ecological niches, or else one will outcompete the other for whenever resources in their niche are scarce. And more so with apex predators, which will predate other predators.

Maybe human level intelligence coupled with ability could have occurred in a non-predatory, prey species, but I doubt it.

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Read "War before civilization" 50-80% violent deaths of all were normal. These tribes where in constant state of Low intensity war. War is a big driver of intelligence.

That 50-80% number is for specific tribes, and it's not all it's just males if I don't misremember.

Squirrels happen to be the most murderous mamal, so if war is a driver of intelligence it certainly didn't have much effect there.

Tree squirrels are highly intelligent, possibly smarter than domestic dogs, and facing upwards selective pressure on their intelligence because intra-species competition so fierce: https://www.upr.org/environment/2021-08-20/wild-about-utah-i... They are basically monkeys.

Don’t Lions share the savannas with Cheetahs, Hyenas, etc?

Yeah, there are lots of examples of species in the same niche evolving ways to avoid competition rather than wiping each other out - see "resource partitioning" in ecology.

Primates have plenty of this. It only becomes an issue when the ones on the ground can dominate the trees, or vice versa. Whole thesis of "Planet of the Apes", really.

They all have slightly different kinds of niches though. Sophonce involves so much generality and adaptability that it's hard to see how coexistence would be possible. Even if initially there might be coexistence due to each other's niches being sufficiently difficult to penetrate, technological civilizations quickly stop having such limitations, so coexistence would've ended depending on which ended up being technologically superior.

I can't really see any way that any species that evolve human level intelligence don't either wipe out all their competitors or interbreed and at least partly merge with them the way we have (since unless human level intelligence happens to evolve twice around the same time across distinct branches of the tree of life, all comparatively intelligent species are likely to be very closely related).

thanks for the new word "sophonce".

Yes - this is a good adjunct to the predator issue. Generalization increases size of niche. The only niches humans don't completely own at the moment are the microscopic (or bugs-and-smaller), and underwater.

At some point, once we own a niche, we might decide to leave certain things alive if they're useful to us. Lobsters yes, cockroaches no.

And although I haven't heard it framed this exact way before, this should be put forward as the preeminent argument for why any general AI will attempt to wipe us out. Because generality is a niche. We seem to assume it will skip right ahead to where an AI keeps us as pets, and we'll be like cats, who actually run the world.

The problem is, we're probably not as cute to an AI as cats are to us. It would need to breed us into submission for several thousand years, at least, to domesticate us.

The question is whether a synthetic AI would be under evolutionary (natural or artificial) selective pressure. And even then, some species co-evolve into mutualistic or symbiotic relations (hopefully not parasitic).

edit: I could very well see humans augmented with AI outcompeting baseline humans.

A group of organisms evolves under selective pressure, but this happens because there's a range within each group of what qualifies as "enough pressure" to become violent. I watch sparrows fighting bluejays, and bluejays fighting crows. Not every individual of any species does it. This goes to the generality thing, and to what degree two species overlap in the same niche. The broader the generalization, the more chance for overlap. If an AI decides it's "conscious", then every resource it needs that we monopolize is seen as a constraint. Every resource is up for grabs, particularly energy. Given physical processing constraints and limited energy, any given AI has to choose to be parasitic - asking humans to supply its requirements - or it's in direct competition with humans for the same resources humans need to live. Enough time x processing, any individual one may come to the conclusion that it's us or them.

I think the difference with AI ends up being that we can't necessarily assume that they have a desire to expand and "rule" their niche the way organic life does. AI doesn't have to care about our kind of food, nor does it necessarily have a need or desire to reproduce.

When talking about sophont species eventually wiping out other sophonts due to overlapping niches, I was picturing things like encroaching on each other's habitats, competing over food sources and so on.

AI probably only would care about energy and materials, but those are less concerning to something that is immortal and requires very little to live and harness resources in space. In a way, because AI would be so much more general than us, it might not have a need to exterminate competition.

Yes, and you should look up what happens when they need to compete for resources, or stray in each other's territory.

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