Are we in danger of extinction?  What kind of things could cause us to go extinct?
The article touches on AI and if it could threaten our existence in the future.
‘There is important research going on in those areas, but the really impressive stuff is hidden away inside AI journals,’ he said. He told me about a team from the University of Alberta that recently trained an AI to play the 1980s video game Pac-Man. Only they didn’t let the AI see the familiar, overhead view of the game. Instead, they dropped it into a three-dimensional version, similar to a corn maze, where ghosts and pellets lurk behind every corner. They didn’t tell it the rules, either; they just threw it into the system and punished it when a ghost caught it. ‘Eventually the AI learned to play pretty well,’ Dewey said. ‘That would have been unheard of a few years ago, but we are getting to that point where we are finally starting to see little sparkles of generality.’
Bostrum also talks about why he hopes we don't find life on Mars. Â By "great filter" he's talking about the idea that either advanced life on Earth is a cosmic fluke or there is something that prevents civilizations from becoming more space-worthy than our own…in other words, how come we don't see aliens out in the universe.
That’s why Bostrom hopes the Curiosity rover fails. ‘Any discovery of life that didn’t originate on Earth makes it less likely the great filter is in our past, and more likely it’s in our future,’ he told me. If life is a cosmic fluke, then we’ve already beaten the odds, and our future is undetermined — the galaxy is there for the taking. If we discover that life arises everywhere, we lose a prime suspect in our hunt for the great filter. The more advanced life we find, the worse the implications. If Curiosity spots a vertebrate fossil embedded in Martian rock, it would mean that a Cambrian explosion occurred twice in the same solar system. It would give us reason to suspect that nature is very good at knitting atoms into complex animal life, but very bad at nurturing star-hopping civilisations. It would make it less likely that humans have already slipped through the trap whose jaws keep our skies lifeless. It would be an omen.
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Ross Andersen – Humanity’s deep future
When we peer into the fog of the deep future what do we see – human extinction or a future among the stars?
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Excellent review. It seems as though Bostrum is neglecting his simulation conjecture. We may be the only intelligent species due to the aesthetic choices of the sim author. That raises different existential risks even as it moots others.