Submitted by StaerDuck t3_yx395b in Futurology
So as the title states, if it is possible to create an asi soon in the future why haven't the previous civilusations created one or why can't we see it? Is it even possible to create such a thing if it doesn't yet exist?
I would advise looking up the definitions of such words as "progression" and "evolution".
Why do you imply that we all agree that there were industrialized civilizations before us? Joe Rogan interviews? There most likely weren't any, and I strongly assume that something like us humans is probably quite unique or at least rare in our whole galaxy.
I don't fully understand what you mean.
Are you saying that if we have the potential to create an asi, it should have been created already?
If this is what you mean, then it perfectly natural to conceptualize something that can't be created yet: Da Vinci thought about tanks and other devices way earlier than they were constructed, and science fiction imagines technologies that come to be true years later.
Also, afaik there's no consensus on the possibility of an agi (artificial general intelligence*). Some people believe it to be an inevitable development, others don't.
*I've read agi defined as an AI that can solve a wide range of types of problems without being specifically tailored to one task, like GPT3 is for text, for example.
Tldr: we don't have the technology yet, and some people believe it's not possible, some possible, and others inevitable.
As for the question if it's possible to create something that doesn't yet exist, that's true for any technology wich by definition didn't exist before being created.
Perhaps you could clarify the question.
If we can go to the moon now, why didn't we see any signs of earlier civilizations going to the moon?
Is that really what you were asking, or is this about alien civilizations?
If you’re talking about alien created AI, that’s a long and complicated answer, but the simplest reason is “space is real real real big”.
Well, that is the Fermi paradox, isnt it?
On a more expansive level, if space-based civilizations are possible, why don't we see the mark of their activity in the universe?
The possible solutions are varied, but one of the answers we are the first high-technology civilization in our patch of the universe, but other solutions are darker, including that no technological civilizations survive long enough to spread to the stars (or create ASI for example).
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Humans have no real AI and certainly no super AI yet so your jumping the gun there.
The universe is really big and full of obstructions, not super old compared to Earth.
We could still easily be one of the first successful intelligent species. We have no metric to judge our ability to guess how common intelligent life really is. Intelligent life might kill itself off about at the level of development we are now or perhaps most intelligent life does not get as intelligent as rapidly as humans did.
Sending radio signals that far and having them recognizable might also be much harder than we are imaging unless your fairly close.
There is no huge mystery here in the sense that we don't already have good enough explanations, we just have no way to check our work and be anywhere near confident in our guesses when where the only example of intelligent life of even a habital planet.
Maybe a better question to ask is why would we think we know that much about the universe when we haven't even found a single other really habital looking planet.
As awesome as the big shots of nebulas and galactic clusters look, when we try to zoom into something as small as a planet we get little more than a blury pixel at any large distance. There's no reason to be surprised when you're only at the and blurry pixel stage that you haven't been able to comb the entire universe for intelligent life.
The one major problem with this question in general is that initially we assumed unbelievable high amount of planets could be habitable that probably aren't because they're just too close to the center of galaxies. That has lead us constantly assumed with zero proof that we should be seeing all this life even in our own galaxy.
I will take the opposite approach and say that intelligent life is so rare your lucky to have more than one intelligent species per galaxy and beyond that communication between distant galaxies is harder than we think. Prove me wrong!
I will also interpret the age of the Earth at about 4.5 billion versus the universe at 13 billion to suggest that there's only been a relative short amount of time for development when you consider it took 4.5 billion years for the biosphere to form and give intelligent life a chnace of happening.
Its too Easy to look at just humans development of intelligence and theorize that it could happen quickly, but there's no actual proof of that and really there's only proof that it takes about 4.5 billion years.
We may very well be some of the first .. to survive to this level of development in the visable universe for all we know at this point.... Once you solve all those questions then you can worry about the implications of artificial intelligence!
Good answer.
I like to think it's the early game in some sense. Or atleast, we are too small // un-teched to recognize the signs of other civs out in the universe. TBF, my astronomy is pretty weak right now, I'm not sure what our range limits are for detecting ET life tells with our current tech (city lights being on at night, etc).
The question also makes me think of the Bob-iverse book series. It's a Human Emotions Von Neuman probe that goes on adventures. You'd think something like a von Neuman Probe would survive from ET civs. Even if the civ did not make it.
For all we know, maybe the Vulcans are waiting until we reach Warp 3 before they will consider us worth openly engaging with.
Stay Saucy 🖖
SometimesITalk16 t1_iwmkju7 wrote
So you're saying we don't have the tech to do it, but you think people in the past with less tech than us had the capability to do it? That makes no sense whatsoever.