Comment by ignostic | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ignostic | Hacker News Reader

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It's true that once something was able to reach us, they'd probably have very little interest in conquering us, stealing our resources, or anything else "movie aliens" do. Where I disagree is that such beings wouldn't be interested in us.

Start with us. Despite knowing basically where we came from, what our ancestors looked like, and how their DNA would look, we're still fascinated to find links and steps along the way. I'm still intrigued by bugs and bacteria, despite being much more advanced and sophisticated. We still call our dogs "smart," and enjoy when they communicate with us in their simple ways.

Anything that goes into space is probably curious. You don't even start a space program to look or travel elsewhere if you're not interested in what might be out there!

How could you not be interested in an entirely different biosphere? In exploring among plants and animals, the likes of which you'd never seen? If you lack that kind of curiosity, you'd just stay home in the first place. We're all just speculating of course, but it's an interesting topic.

You've fallen into a trap: anthropomorphizing aliens.

Aliens aren't necessarily anything like us. Curiosity isn't necessarily a property of life. An example: cats don't appear to experience remorse, yet dogs do. One could envision the same for curiosity.

One motivation for a space program is when a civilization realizes their resources will be gone in a matter of centuries.

One of the classic examples is the Paperclip Maximizer thought experiment. A paperclip maximizer is a superintelligent AI whose sole goal is to maximize the number of paperclips in the universe. Such a being is curious to the extent that learning more about the universe increases the expected number of paperclips in its future light-cone.

A paperclip maximizer is indifferent to your existence, but thoroughly believes that it could make better use of your planet than you could, as you are hardly optimized for the production of paperclips.

Obviously the Paperclip Maximizer would be supplanted by the Maximizer Maximizer, which only sees value in copies of itself. The Maximizer Maximizer that stumbles onto the mental trait "curiosity" will eventually crush all other variants of Maximizer. Once it develops the advanced technologies of space travel, it discovers that seizing faraway planets is possible but going through all that trouble is not a net positive towards self-actualization as a Maximizer Maximizer Maximizer.

Thus TFA is correct.

Obviously the Maximizer Maximizer is just another potential foe for the Paperclip Maximizer to seek out and crush in its infancy. (Sound brutal? It isn't; if you pull it off right, not a single paperclip will be harmed.)

The potency of the Minimizer Maximizer is more likely to be discovered by a curious Maximizer variant. But will it have the wisdom to not to employ it?

But you are falling into a anthroporeligio trap of assuming the Paperclip Maximizer considers potential paperclips in their uncoiled wire form to have comparable moral status as actual paperclips, once the wire reaches the factory floor.

The Paperclip Maximizer: inconceivable, conceivable but not metaphysically possible, or metaphysically possible? I sense the approach of the p-zombie.

I'm not sure what you mean by "conceivable" and "metaphysically possible", and I don't see a resemblance to p-zombies. Could you elaborate?

just trolling. The distinction was posed here (http://philpapers.org/surveys/results.pl). The resemblance: if a superintelligent AI lacks 'conscious experience, qualia, or sentience'.

Sounds like a crappy example though, as far as examples/thought experiments go.

How is this specific choice of example any good, or makes any sense?

It's alien enough that people won't try to anthropomorphize the Paperclip Maximizer. That's not an easy thing for an example to accomplish. And it was originally conceived for talking about artificial intelligence, which makes it a bit less outlandish.

Curiosity, by this point, is extremely likely to be a required condition for intelligence in any species. You should look into the AI work done in developmental robotics and Artificial Curiosity...

By what point? In time? In evolution? Because curiosity can be simulated with machines why does that prove that its a characteristic of all developing biological life?

For one, any technological civilisation needs curiosity as it's basis.

Second, curiosity is prevalent all around advanced animals, mammals etc. Seems like an emergent property of evolution, that would be hard to not come out in any evolutionary process.

"by this point" == "given the degree of understanding of Intelligence that we have reached so far"

Maybe that's because we've designed it to resemble our own intelligence?

I would think that a prerequisite for space exploration would be curiosity. I mean you make a good point, but the willingness to go beyond one's current means and traveling through the unknown kind of allude to an instinctual curiosity to see what is new and different.

To develop advanced technology without curiosity would be rather implausible.

>You've fallen into a trap: anthropomorphizing aliens. Aliens aren't necessarily anything like us.

Yes, we're talking about aliens that ARE like us here. Not some alien bacteria.

As far as evolution is concerned, it should work pretty much the same in any planet, and produce more or less similar results.

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