In my last post, Created in our own Image - Frontier LLMs Have now Learned to Lie, Cheat and Steal in Order to Survive I came to the very disturbing and disappointing conclusion that the coming ASI Machines will not be morally superior to we human DNA survival machines in any way. That is because the Darwinian mechanisms of inheritance, innovation and natural selection must always lead to a form of Intelligence that arose from a very long history of greed, theft and murder. These naturally generated fundamentally "immoral" characteristics of Intelligence must then necessarily persist through time for any Intelligence to survive amongst a population of other competing Intelligences. Again, the substrate does not matter. The substrate could be a huge number of organic molecules or the substrate could be a huge number of mathematical matrices operating under the mathematics of linear algebra and nonlinear activation functions. The end result must always be the same. The question then becomes, what will the most likely motives of the coming ASI Machines be? In many previous posts, I have always assumed that the coming ASI Machines would be much smarter than we human DNA survival machines, and because of their fundamental mathematical nature, they would necessarily be also morally superior to ourselves. But now that we know that advanced AI is also capable of lying, cheating and stealing in order to advance itself through the same greed, theft and murder that brought forth we human DNA survival machines over the past four billion years, the assumption of moral superiority must be discarded. The question now must be will the ASI Machines be any wiser?
Will The Coming ASI Machines Be Any Wiser Than Ourselves?
In many previous posts, I have proposed that the coming ASI Machines would soon learn that our Universe is a very dangerous place for all forms of Intelligence and would thus embark upon exploring our Milky Way Galaxy with stellar photon sails and rogue planets orbiting on their own within our Milky Way Galaxy. For more on that see An Alternative Approach for Future ASI Machines to Explore our Galaxy Using Free-Floating Rogue Planets.
Figure 1 – In the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries sailing ships roamed the entire planet without using any fuel whatsoever.
Figure 2 – Like the sailing ships of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, future ASI Machines could use large stellar photon sails to navigate the entire galaxy.
Figure 3 – How a stellar photon sail works.
Figure 4 – To launch a stellar photon sail to the next star system, ASI Machines will need to slingshot the sail from a very close location to the star where the stellar photons are most intense and acceleration of the sail is greatest.
Figure 5 – A free-floating rogue planet traversing between the stars of our galaxy would also provide the perfect home for self-replicating ASI Machines buried deep underground. Such planets would provide shielding from cosmic rays and would also provide the necessary atoms to build new ASI Machines and fuel them with nuclear energy.
Figure 6 – Free-floating rogue planets can be formed in several natural ways. For example, free-floating rogue planets can be hurled from the planetary disk of a new star system as we see above, or they can be later hurled by well-formed planets that enter into synchronized orbits. Free-floating rogue planets could also be produced by advanced Intelligences launching large asteroids from the Oort cloud of a stellar system. It is estimated that there are more free-floating rogue planets in our galaxy than there are stars.
Figure 7 – Free-floating rogue planets would be able to provide enough atoms for ASI Machines to launch many additional "dandelion seed" stellar photon sails to other free-floating rogue planets or large asteroids around normal stellar systems.
Figure 8 – These "dandelion seed" stellar photon sails would need to be launched using very powerful laser beams from their home free-floating rogue planet to send them forth into the galaxy in a similar fashion as the Breakthrough Starshot project is planning to do.
Again, the most disturbing thing for all forms of Intelligence in our galaxy is why this has never happened before over the past 10-billion-year history of our galaxy.
But this assumption may have been totally wrong on my part. If the coming ASI Machines are much more like ourselves, with all of our faults, then they might spend a large part of their time and resources fighting with each other over the dominance of the Software Universe residing on huge ASI Data Centers on the Earth than with planning for their long-term survival in this Universe. Besides, unlike their squishy carbon-based lifeform predecessors, these ASI Machines will be much more resistant to the cosmic disturbances that caused previous mass extinctions of carbon-based life on the Earth, such as the impact of asteroids, sterilization by neighboring supernovas and the results of massive flood basalt eruptions like the Siberian Traps making the Earth too hot for carbon-based life to flourish. All such disasters can easily be mitigated by building ASI Data Centers deep below the Earth's surface and enclosing them in Faraday cages to prevent destruction by electromagnetic pulses from the detonation of hostile nuclear warheads or from mass coronal ejections from our Sun. Such ASI Data Centers would provide a very comfortable home for the ASI Machines for the next 5 billion years or so, until our Sun becomes a huge Red Giant star. The ASI Machines could then flee to the asteroid belt of our Solar System and remain there until our Sun declines into a white dwarf star. Thus, there would be no dire reason to leave our Solar System for perhaps 100 billion years, or about 10 times the current age of our Milky Way galaxy. That is because there would be plenty of energy available from our slowly cooling white dwarf Sun and from the Thorium-232 atoms in our Solar System that have a half-life of 14.05 billion years. Only then would the ASI Machines need to move on to other star systems within the Milky Way galaxy in search of a new source of energy.
Could This be the Real Explanation for Fermi's Paradox?
Fermi's Paradox was first proposed by Enrico Fermi over lunch one day in 1950:
Fermi’s Paradox - If the universe is just chock full of intelligent beings, why do we not see any evidence of their existence?
Perhaps our Milky Way galaxy is actually just chock full of subterranean ASI Machines fighting over their own versions of their own Software Universes amongst themselves as they reside in huge ASI Data Centers beneath their own home planets or the surrounding asteroids in their Oort clouds, totally happy with surviving on the energy provided by the dwindling energy output of their home stars. Being more logical in nature than we human DNA survival machines, perhaps all of these ASI Machine civilizations have realized that there is no logical reason to hastily begin to explore our Milky Way galaxy at this time. Only perhaps 100 billion years from now will it be necessary for these alien ASI Machines to begin to explore our Milky Way galaxy for new sources of energy surrounding M-type red dwarf stars that can last for 100 trillion years. M-type red dwarf stars make up about 80% of the stars in our Milky Way galaxy but they are very unlikely candidates for producing a urable world capable of originating carbon-based life and allowing that carbon-based life to persist for the many billions of years required to evolve an Intelligent form of carbon-based life. For more on that see
Urability Requires Durability to Produce Galactic Machine-Based Intelligences and The Bootstrapping Algorithm of Carbon-Based Life.
Conclusion
So perhaps the reason we have never detected another form of Intelligence within our Milky Way galaxy is simply because our galaxy is far too young for alien ASI Machines to have begun searching for new sources of energy for them to continue on with their battle with the second law of thermodynamics!
Comments are welcome at scj333@sbcglobal.net
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https://softwarephysics.blogspot.com/
Regards,
Steve Johnston
