Mind Matters Natural and Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis

TagGreat Filter Hypothesis

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Abstract planets and space background
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post
Author
News
Date
February 27, 2022
Categorized
Arts & Culture, Environment, Ethics, Medicine and Health, Science
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Future Technologies — Zoom! … or Doom?

Astrophysicist Adam Frank sees a new role for us as galaxy gods as exhilarating but others aren’t so sure
News
February 27, 2022
8
Arts & Culture, Environment, Ethics, Medicine and Health, Science

Astrophysicist Adam Frank asks us to consider where we are on the Kardashev Scale for evaluating civilizations in the galaxy — or, at least, evaluating our own progress: Originally proposed in 1964 by Nikolai Kardashev (1932–2019) and later modified in 1973 by Carl Sagan (1934–1996), the scale measures a civilization’s technological advances from 1 to 3 (or maybe 5) by how much energy it can call upon to do things. Currently, we are not even a Type 1 on that scale and Frank offers some thoughts on that, asking, in particular, whether such advances are universal in the galaxy anyway: The classification scheme Kardashev used was not based on social systems of ethics because these are things that we can Read More ›

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Girl in orange shirt standing near house robot
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post
Author
News
Date
November 13, 2021
Categorized
Artificial Intelligence, Philosophy of Mind
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Silicon Valley Insider: Why Friendly Super-AI Won’t Happen

Venture capitalist Peter Thiel talks about the Great Filter hypothesis: Why should we assume a superior artificial intelligence would be friendly?
News
November 13, 2021
4
Artificial Intelligence, Philosophy of Mind

In a wide-ranging talk at the recent COSM 2021 conference (November 10–12), Peter Thiel (a PayPal and Facebook founder) expressed concern that people worry a great deal about artificial intelligence that thinks like people (AGI) but the real push now is for massive “dumb” surveillance AI peering into every detail of our lives, for the benefit of either government or the corporate world. He went on to say that he doubts that artificial general intelligence (AGI) — “superhuman software that can do everything that we can do” — would, in any event, be “friendly.” That is, that it “won’t kill us.” If it is intelligent enough to be independent, why should we assume so? “Friendly” is a human value, hard Read More ›

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Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover is exploring surface of Mars. Perseverance rover Mission Mars exploration of red planet. Space exploration, science concept. .Elements of this image furnished by NASA.
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post
Author
News
Date
April 10, 2021
Categorized
Philosophy, Science
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Why Some Experts Hope We DON’T Find Life on Mars

Many thinkers worry about what will happen if the extraterrestrials land. But will they feel worse if we never find ET?
News
April 10, 2021
6
Philosophy, Science

Recently, prominent theoretical physicist Michio Kaku (pictured) told media that reaching out to extraterrestrials is a “terrible idea.” Kaku, author of The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything (2021). So long SETI, after all these years? Well, not quite. He explains, Soon we’ll have the Webb telescope up in orbit and we’ll have thousands of planets to look at, and that’s why I think the chances are quite high that we may make contact with an alien civilisation. There are some colleagues of mine that believe we should reach out to them. I think that’s a terrible idea. We all know what happened to Montezuma when he met Cortés in Mexico so many hundreds of years ago. Read More ›

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3D Rendered Fantasy Alien Landscape With Abstract Formations - 3D Illustration
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post
Author
News
Date
September 5, 2020
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Arts & Culture
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Seven Reasons (So Far) Why the Aliens Never Show Up

Some experts think they became AI and some that they were killed by their AI but others say they never existed. Who's most likely right?
News
September 5, 2020
11
Arts & Culture

Science fiction author Matt Williams is writing a series at Universe Today that offers the leading explanations for why They never write, They never phone… It’s based on an incident in 1950 when Italian physicist Enrico Fermi (1901–1954) asked colleagues at the Los Alamos National Laboratory a question: If space aliens are a sure thing, “Where is everybody?” As Seth Shostak puts it at Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), The remark came while Fermi was discussing with his mealtime mates the possibility that many sophisticated societies populate the Galaxy. They thought it reasonable to assume that we have a lot of cosmic company. But somewhere between one sentence and the next, Fermi’s supple brain realized that if this was true, Read More ›