In today's thought experiment you are abducted by aliens. Before you get your knickers in a twist, no they are not interested in probing you. They turn out to be extremely friendly and intelligent. They tell you that you have been chosen at random to make a very important decision (or at least vote on it, they hint that you may not be the only abductee though you see no signs of others).
The aliens have knowledge and technology that could transform earth into a paradise but it comes at a terrible price. They can eliminate all forms of suffering due to disease, war, accidents, crime, etc using something they call "femtotechnology" but after 1000 years the atomic-scale machines will turn into grey goo and destroy all life and other complex structures that it has contact with.
So the question for you is this: Do you accept their gift along with the deferred death sentence for everyone and everything on Earth or do you decline and let humanity forge its own future? The aliens show you enough that you have every reason to believe they are telling you nothing but the truth in this matter.
Vector: Keith Henson. I hope you are well wherever you are.
RE: virus: The alien proposition
« Reply #1 on: 2005-11-06 16:39:07 »
[Blunderov] I don't think I would accept. There's always a chance that we may go on to do better than the aliens. Slim, admittedly. Vanishingly small even. But at least that theoretical possibility exists.
Also I don't think I would have the courage to make such a decision on behalf of so many people. I think I would decide that 'first do no harm' would be the correct principle to apply.
Tempting though.
Best Regards.
David Lucifer Sent: 06 November 2005 20:29
<snip>So the question for you is this: Do you accept their gift along with the deferred death sentence for everyone and everything on Earth or do you decline and let humanity forge its own future? The aliens show you enough that you have every reason to believe they are telling you nothing but the truth in this matter. </snip>
Iwould have to agree with Blunderov here. I would be unable to accept a 1000 year outer limit on the existence of human civilization, however paradisical it might be in the interim.
In today's thought experiment you are abducted by aliens. Before you get your knickers in a twist, no they are not interested in probing you. They turn out to be extremely friendly and intelligent. They tell you that you have been chosen at random to make a very important decision (or at least vote on it, they hint that you may not be the only abductee though you see no signs of others).
The aliens have knowledge and technology that could transform earth into a paradise but it comes at a terrible price. They can eliminate all forms of suffering due to disease, war, accidents, crime, etc using something they call "femtotechnology" but after 1000 years the atomic-scale machines will turn into grey goo and destroy all life and other complex structures that it has contact with.
So the question for you is this: Do you accept their gift along with the deferred death sentence for everyone and everything on Earth or do you decline and let humanity forge its own future? The aliens show you enough that you have every reason to believe they are telling you nothing but the truth in this matter.
Vector: Keith Henson. I hope you are well wherever you are.
I was thinking that given femtotechnology, and given the resources that would be freed up from dealing with other issues of suffering, that 1000 years ought to be a long enough time (especially if they know about the problem at the begining) for humans to work out a solution to the collapse of femtotech 1000 years from now. I would think that if humanity could not figure out one single problem with undiverted resources in that period of time, we probably aren't long for this world anyway. I of course have some reservations, similar to Bluderov, about making a decision for so many other people without their input, but if others were making it for me, I would probably want the technological boost along with the accompanying knowledge it would bestow. Given that all people would know the problems posed by the deal, I think we could come up with a solution in 1000 years.
« Last Edit: 2005-11-07 21:44:07 by Jake Sapiens »
RE: virus: The alien proposition
« Reply #4 on: 2005-11-07 22:43:55 »
[Blunderov] I don't think I would accept. There's always a chance that we may go on to do better than the aliens. Slim, admittedly. Vanishingly small even. But at least that theoretical possibility exists.
Also I don't think I would have the courage to make such a decision on behalf of so many people. I think I would decide that 'first do no harm' would be the correct principle to apply.
[Lucifer] Wouldn't the probability of doing better than the aliens be vastly improved by accepting their gift? You can opt out of providing input into the decision, but then you would just be letting others make the decision for you. If you want to "do no harm" why would you choose disease over health, war over peace, death over life?
Because of this nasty ending clause to the contract:
*but after 1000 years the atomic-scale machines will turn into grey goo and destroy all life and other complex structures that it has contact with.*
I'm assuming that after 1000 years they'd have been in some sort of contact with damned near everything (except *maybe* antique landmarks and museum curios) and everyone (or their progenitors), in order to be able to make it so nice for so long; to lose all of our infrastructure and all of our species members is not only extinction, it is semiotic obliteration, without any signs left to show that we'd even existed for that thousand years, and no remaining pristine (un-nanotouched) technology with which we could even attempt to upload and preserve our personas before the nanoarmageddon arrived to dissolve our nanocompromised bodies. If they're so much farther advanced than us that they can gift us with a paradise on earth, I'm pretty sure that they could fulfill that lethal little codicil, too.
I'd NEVER accept a deal, however sweetened and spiced, that superglued a time-certain terminus onto the life and achievements of the human species. Nor would I take for granted, given the obvious magnitude of their head start on us, that in the intervening thousand years we could figure out a way to get around them and their deadly promise.
Now maybe that's not the deal you intended to mean, but that's how it reads to me. And a deal like that is no deal that any transhumanists, posthumanists, immortalists or extropians could in good faith accept. Nor do the aliens sound too friendly either, when you think about it; the nice, shiny apple they are offering us is poisoned, contaminating and eventually killing all who would embrace it's malignantly deceptive promise, and eventually ensuring our species demise.
Re:The alien proposition
« Reply #6 on: 2005-11-08 07:54:32 »
Base Assumptions: Nobody lives forever. The dead don't care. No dominant species we know of has had more than 10Myr as the dominant species.
Choices and Outcomes:
Accept: 1000 years of misery avoided. Proof that we can live with evolutionary challenges. Some possibility to develop a work around for the grey goo scenario. At worst, if we haven't figured out the puzzle, those alive at the time of the grey goo event potentially suffer for a short while before they die. Assuming we don't avoid the grey goo event, there are no successors and thus no need to leave anything for posterity.
Reject: Pain suffering and misery continue until we develop femto tech (which might be faster than expected because it is now known to be possible). It might also be never, because technological (and intellectual) breakthroughs are singularities. They cannot be predicted or projected with any hope of reliability.
Note that in either scenario we might still end up being zapped - or not. We may earn eradication for not being sufficiently evolutionary, or for being over evolutionary, or for not having swallowed a poison pill - or just die because we did swallow it. Then again, we might have earned our right to live quietly as might have demonstrated sufficiently that we lack all ambition to development. There is not enough information to take this into account. So if we can't find out more from the "aliens" - particularly about their motivations, then we must decide based on the above two cases if we are to b rational. We can't deny the rest of humanity the benfits on offer simply because we are overwhelmed. Guess which one seems preferable to me?
Now ask yourself, under what assumptions would you have to be operating in order for the choice not to accept the benefits seem rational?
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
I don't know...to me, a good analogy for the proposal is a choice between wiring one's brain into a power line that pumps juice to one's pleasure centers and blisses one out, all the while knowing that in a year the wires will corrode and short out and one will be electrocuted, or going through both the pains and the pleasures of life without them, and having the distinct but far from guaranteed prospect of living for an appreciably longer span. Of course, the differences are:
1) between an individual and a species of several billion, and
2) a longer periodicity - one year vs. 1000.
But is it really longer, when perused through the species lens? The human race has been producing cultural artifacts (knapping Acheulian hand-axes) for at least half a million years, and we have the evidence of symbolic depictions more than 20,000 years old, and written language dating from more than 5000 years ago. And, of course, the future has yet to be decided; unlike a single life (these days), the life span of our species cannot be readily estimated. If one chooses the first figure as a benchmark, just another thousand years looks pretty meagre compared to it; however, if one chooses one of the other two figures, it would appear that our species is yet in its infancy, far too young, and with too much yet ahead for it to achieve and become, to be going around sealing its ultimate fate so soon. In fact, considering how long so many species have perdured, a million years, or even two (if one counts Lucy-esque skeletal fossil remains), seems like comparatively short shrift for us.
I suppose it depends upon whether one is optimistic or pessimistic regarding the prospect of our species' demise. To live for a year in guaranteed pleasure and then die might be a reasonable proposition for a 100 year old, but does not appear to be a rational trade-off for a ten year old. Does one think our species, as it now stands, is in its adolescence or its senescence? Upon the answer to this question does the decision (whatever it is), and the logic behind it, depend.
Unless, that is, one is merely selfish and cares not a whit what happens to the human race after one (and perhaps all the people one has made or met) dies. But for those people, aliens wouldn't have to offer a thousand years; a hundred would be plenty.
Re:The alien proposition
« Reply #8 on: 2005-11-08 10:45:19 »
I would say that we actually face this dilemma with any new technology, the difference being when arrive at human made technological breakthroughs/singularities, we don't know ahead of time what sort of unintended consequences will result, and generally the unintended consequences occur sooner. So actually the deal proposed by "femto-technology" is a rather generous one in comparison to the usual crises we constantly bring on ourselves. For example the internal combustion engine is already presenting us with some catastrophic weather and climate consequences in less that 200 years, and if we don't start replacing it soon the worst will happen far sooner than 1000 years. And again, if femto-technology were to follow the same kind of R&D program that other human technology follows, there is no reason to believe that it can't or won't be eventually replaced by the next singularity. If somebody offered us the same deal with vaccum tubes in the 1800's, we would be in no trouble today because now there is no need for vaccum tubes, plus we would have an earlier start toward the computational singularity if not have already arrived. This seems to happen regularly in area of technology, why would femto-technology be an exception?
Finally if for some exceptional reason this isn't the case, maybe femtotechnology is really to complicated to us even after 1000 years to move past it? etc., we can at least plan for its containment on schedule, and the resources freed up by femto-tech in the meantime can help us accomplish other things not so dependent on it. (Perhaps the development of femtofree space travel to maximize the number of possible escapes from the grey goo). Of course I want more information before making such a real decision, but as a thought experiment I'm in favor of accepting such a deal.
Base Assumptions: Nobody lives forever. The dead don't care. No dominant species we know of has had more than 10Myr as the dominant species.
Choices and Outcomes:
Accept: 1000 years of misery avoided. Proof that we can live with evolutionary challenges. Some possibility to develop a work around for the grey goo scenario. At worst, if we haven't figured out the puzzle, those alive at the time of the grey goo event potentially suffer for a short while before they die. Assuming we don't avoid the grey goo event, there are no successors and thus no need to leave anything for posterity.
Reject: Pain suffering and misery continue until we develop femto tech (which might be faster than expected because it is now known to be possible). It might also be never, because technological (and intellectual) breakthroughs are singularities. They cannot be predicted or projected with any hope of reliability.
Note that in either scenario we might still end up being zapped - or not. We may earn eradication for not being sufficiently evolutionary, or for being over evolutionary, or for not having swallowed a poison pill - or just die because we did swallow it. Then again, we might have earned our right to live quietly as might have demonstrated sufficiently that we lack all ambition to development. There is not enough information to take this into account. So if we can't find out more from the "aliens" - particularly about their motivations, then we must decide based on the above two cases if we are to b rational. We can't deny the rest of humanity the benfits on offer simply because we are overwhelmed. Guess which one seems preferable to me?
Now ask yourself, under what assumptions would you have to be operating in order for the choice not to accept the benefits seem rational?
Hermit
PS Agree re Keith.
« Last Edit: 2005-11-09 00:42:57 by Jake Sapiens »
In today's thought experiment you are abducted by aliens. Before you get your knickers in a twist, no they are not interested in probing you. They turn out to be extremely friendly and intelligent. They tell you that you have been chosen at random to make a very important decision (or at least vote on it, they hint that you may not be the only abductee though you see no signs of others).
The aliens have knowledge and technology that could transform earth into a paradise but it comes at a terrible price. They can eliminate all forms of suffering due to disease, war, accidents, crime, etc using something they call "femtotechnology" but after 1000 years the atomic-scale machines will turn into grey goo and destroy all life and other complex structures that it has contact with.
So the question for you is this: Do you accept their gift along with the deferred death sentence for everyone and everything on Earth or do you decline and let humanity forge its own future? The aliens show you enough that you have every reason to believe they are telling you nothing but the truth in this matter.
Vector: Keith Henson. I hope you are well wherever you are.
I didn't see "deferred death sentence for everyone" as the natural conclusion of what came before that, see my responses on that. I just understood that it would "destroy all life and other complex structures that it has contact with." Especially with foreknowledge I would think a containment strategy ought to be possible at least for the Amish (whom we know don't want femto-tech), if not an eventual replacement of the technology for everyone else. If, however you are asking me to vote for a "death sentence for everyone", I'm more likely in Blunderov's camp. It might have just been rhetoric (my first interpretation), but if taken seriously it changes the decision considerably.
« Last Edit: 2005-11-08 23:50:44 by Jake Sapiens »
Re:The alien proposition
« Reply #10 on: 2005-11-08 21:40:20 »
I suppose I have a little different perspective on this, since it's pretty much just what recently happened here on a smaller scale. You do something that seems like a good idea at the time, makes life better all around. It's true there is a Really Bad Possible Outcome, but it's been a long time since anything like that happened and it will probably be a long time before it happens again. And we have time to formulate a better response than the demonstrably inadequate hack we start out with.
Except, we don't ever actually improve anything. Years go by, decades, centuries in the case of femtotech, and everything is just ducky. Starting out the Really Bad Outcome is so distant as to be a non-problem, and as it gets closer and more worrisome all those years of it not being a problem are what we tend to remember. And is it really thinkable to abandon the advantages we have come to take for granted because the mortgage is finally due? Or to spend craploads of money and effort on protection efforts that seem, frankly, a little silly given the long and peaceful history we've enjoyed?
Think "New Orleans" instead of "Earth," "century" instead of "millennium," "draining the swamp" instead of "femtotech," "category 5" instead of "gray goo," and you have what just happened to New Orleans. Having just lived through that and seen how we got here, the only sane advice I can give is to not take the chocolate in the first place. It's not that we couldn't find a way to avoid the Really Bad Outcome, it's that our own history and temprament suggest we won't bother until it is too late because at first it won't seem important and later it won't seem real.
Think "New Orleans" instead of "Earth," "century" instead of "millennium," "draining the swamp" instead of "femtotech," "category 5" instead of "gray goo," and you have what just happened to New Orleans. Having just lived through that and seen how we got here, the only sane advice I can give is to not take the chocolate in the first place. It's not that we couldn't find a way to avoid the Really Bad Outcome, it's that our own history and temprament suggest we won't bother until it is too late because at first it won't seem important and later it won't seem real.
The analog for (the benefit in question) "femtotech" should be "building New Orleans" not "draining the swamp". When seen in this light this becomes more of an argument for taking threats seriously rather than an argument against accepting the benefit with its inherent risks. I agree we should take threats seriously, but it also is rational to discount future threats appropriately.
BTW Keith Henson showed up in #virus, He is alive and well and living in the Mortmain Mountains. He mentioned that he originally brought up this thought experiment to demonstrate the failure of discount economics. The implication is that if you employ discount economics then you will likely accept the alien gift because the big cost (grey goo scenario) in 1000 years will be discounted to almost zero at normal discount rates (around 10%/year). Since Keith thinks this is obviously the wrong choice it indicates a problem with the methodology. I however believe that the decision is correct and there is nothing wrong with this methodology. The future is discounted precisely because it is uncertain and as Jake pointed out, a lot can happen in 1000 years.
Re:The alien proposition
« Reply #12 on: 2005-11-09 17:07:52 »
Lucifer: I must agree with you re discounts, except that the discount rate is somewhat agressive given the hypothetical thousand year time line, but in much less time - quite probably fairly soon after mid 2007, all bets are likely to be nullified by the self-extinction of Homo Sapiens anyway. So maybe 10% is pretty generous. Of course, depending on how seriously we take the potential for species-wide self-immolation (accidental or deliberate), the more attractive a "lethal quick fix" but with the potential for another 1,000 odd years to live in comfort - and in which to try and find some better end to the story than dissolving into a sea of grey goo may appear. At least in comparison to an invitation to our own pre-mortem cremation - or whatever other cocktail of horrors we might choose to use to extinguish ourselves.
I can - and have - identified some reasons and underlying assumptions as to why saying yes to the hypothesized combination mend-all suicide pill technology might be seen to be sensible. My counter challenge is for the "naysayers" to attempt to identify (and attempt to support) the assumptions that they are using to decide that saying no is a good idea...
Regards
Hermit
PS For the statistics collectors among you, when clearing an account (with a largely unpublicized address) that I had not accessed since 2003, there were under 20 real mail items; and well in excess of 12,000 spam items waiting in it.
PPS I see that "ID" is now, legally speaking, "a theory" in the USA. Hilariously, the Catholics' objections to this are getting much more publicity e.g. http://www.news.com.au/story/0,10117,17162341-13762,00.html than are those of the scientific community. * Hermit goes to fetch a glass of Kool aid...
PPPS I'll comment on rebuilding New Orleans on a separate thread.
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
RE: virus: The alien proposition
« Reply #13 on: 2005-11-09 14:58:18 »
[Lucifer] Wouldn't the probability of doing better than the aliens be vastly improved by accepting their gift? You can opt out of providing input into the decision, but then you would just be letting others make the decision for you. If you want to "do no harm" why would you choose disease over health, war over peace, death over life?
[Blunderov1] It hadn't occurred to me that a work-around would be allowed. (I've tried weaseling you before - with complete lack of success). I took the experiment to stipulate that after 1000 years it was over for sure; a done deal.
Hermit feels that the opinions of the unborn are not relevant and I agree. But I still feel that the living have every reason to hope for yet more brilliant minds to come into being. More Mozarts, Einsteins, Da Vincis, Feynmans etc may yet be born if we keep trying. (I think I'm still OK with pro-choice here BTW, hope so anyway.)
With regard to "do no harm"; if I do not change a thing, I do not think it can be properly said that I have harmed it, so to speak, by omission. Certainly it is possible to lie by omission, and also to cause harm therebye, so I may be on thin ice here. But to my mind 'harm' is more usually thought of as something done deliberately which produces a change for the worse. So, even if it is true that the people who died after a 1000 yrs had had the benefit of a much longer life than they might have otherwise have had, my decision would,(if I had accepted the offer)on that final day, harm them all.
So my position is (currently) that accepting the offer would amount to causing both actual harm to people and would also harm the potential of humanity.
I am pro-choice enough to have spent Christmas and Mother's Day nights camped out in abortion clinics so that potential anti-abortion firebombers would have to take a life (mine) in order to destroy them.
But being pro-choice-in-particular does not mean that one cannot also be pro-life-in-general. Most particularly, I am pro-human-species-perpetuation (actually, pro-entire-ecosystem-perpetuation), and could not in all conscience stomach accepting a deal that would entail that the human species would cease to exist in 1000 years, however happy its members might be in the interim transiting all together in their lavishly appointed luxury train which was inexorably trundling upon its fateful way to the genetic charnel house.
It reminds me of those fat happy rabbits in Watership Down, who were sleek and well-fed by a human warren-keeper, but at the price of serving as his living pantry, having members of their warren periodically snared for food by him - except, in this case, everyone in the terran warren gets barbecued at once, on a date certain.
It has proven, from the discussion proceeding here, to be, however, an excellent (precisely because the Shangri-La-in-the-meantime offer would be so seductive to many humans) strategy by means of which an alien race, if they are willing to wait a while, can have the entire planet vacated for their subsequent settlement with a minimum of fuss. Rather than embarking upon a costly global offensive and having to deal with both mass warfare and the subsequent necessary mopping up of pesky resistance pockets dug in throughout the globe, they could just insinuate a trojan horse gift into our civilization, allow it enough lag time for it to distribute until it has insinuated itself into every global nook and cranny, and plan their moving day. It is a strange take on a Roach Motel; the gift checks in, and in 1000 years, the whole human race checks out.
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