New Approaches on What the Fermi Paradox Means for the Future of Humanity

I was lucky to attend a video lecture by James Miller, economist at Smith College, facilitated by Joshua Fox. Thanks for having this event! I contacted James to let him know I would be posting this and to let him proofread my recapitulation of his argument so as to avoid mis-paraphrasing him; my thanks to him for taking the time to correct me on several points. Of course any errors are mine.

Much of this is familiar terrain for those of us who spend our time considering X-risk and the Fermi paradox. Miller's thesis is that we are at a critically important point in human history, a window where we think that in the near future we can start colonizing the galaxy (the year 2614 at earliest, by this calculation) but at the same time where we are smart enough to destroy ourselves. Since it is not obvious that the galaxy has already been colonized by other civilizations, there may be a Great Filter stopping this from happening. Miller uses the analogy of a person about to climb a mountain, believing that everyone else who has attempted it has died in the process.

Several challenges were discussed by attendees. (If you attended the lecture and want to claim credit for your question, please comment below, thanks.)

1. It's too early to say there are no civilizations; it may not be so easy to detect them or rule them out. We're still discovering metazoans in Manhattan so it seems a little early to rule out von Neumann probes on low gravity bodies in the solar system. We've barely begun to catalog the fauna of our own ocean floors. We could not detect a twin Earth emitting the same radio energy (the C-index), even if it was orbiting Alpha Centauri. Miller points out that even if there were only a few civilizations in the Milky Way preceding us, "the galaxy is older than it is big", and these earlier civilizations could have colonized it already.
   
   
2. He made the point that the things which prove advantageous in the midst of evolving on a single planet might have no such advantages in terms of galactic colonization. Very true; I would argue that we are much more likely to find alien artifacts, than the aliens themselves, as all of us meat-creatures might be stuck on our planets while our machines colonize the galaxy. To that end, (my point) it's entirely plausible that the Solar System could be littered with space probes and we haven't found any yet, or did, and just didn't know what we were looking at.
   
   
3. I would therefore extend Miller's analogy like this. Only in the process of climbing the mountain, does our climber develop wilderness skills and begin to see things that resemble his own boot tracks, etc. and finally as he approaches the summit realizes that lots of people have climbed it, come down the other side, and their descendants have built large villages which due to his previous ignorance he has not been able to locate. (Or, maybe just some of their livestock, trained birds-of-prey, etc. have made it.)
   
   
4. Active attempts to bring ourselves to the attention of aliens have occurred (METI) and been roundly criticized. Miller notes that the risk of extinction from aliens over the next few centuries is lower than eg bio-terrorism or an intelligence singularity. True; but we still may be making life more difficult for our descendants. Related to this, he proposes an ingenious experiment that for a month we should shout our heads off electromagnetically, and see if there is any strange activity. While I agree it's unlikely we'll get invaded next week, I still think the risk:benefit does not work out and there are just too many unknowns, and we may be screwing our distant descendants. Miller suggested that enforcing a moratorium on METI-like activities is probably impossible.
   
   
5. He argues that technological singularities of the paperclip maximizer variety are unlikely to be a major contributor to the Great Filter, because we would be able to see the boundary of it as it expanded (unless it was doing so at light speed.) My concern with this is that, while an AGI might be much smarter than its creators, it is still not omniscient, and the impact of its actions could in principle still outstrip its ability to predict that impact. This is the story behind the rise of human intelligence and the sixth great extinction that we're living through, but has happened in pulses of endogenous extinctions throughout Earth's history (the rise of superpredators every fifty million years or so, the Oxygen Catastrophe). The lesson of evolution here on Earth is that the smarter things are, the faster their behavioral plasticity "catches up with them" in exactly these sorts of disasters, so to suppose that alien paperclip maximizers are immune to this problem is to argue that a qualitative change in ecological dynamics has occurred.
   
   
6. There were two (possibly unappreciated) related questions asked: one about civilization perhaps being bad for sustaining civilization (witness declining birth rates in the developed world) and another that intelligences might prefer virtual reality - involution - to expanding into space. Miller points out the passive version of the "baseball bat" problem: you can live in heaven, but if a bad guy comes and bashes your server with a club and you as you sleep in your VR pod, that's the end of it. (Related: dynamic complex systems like minds, in principle, tend to drift toward delusion and suffer inherent cyclic crises.) It's a thesis for someone in psychology or a related field to note whether there is causation or just correlation between the increasingly encompassing virtual reality-like entertainments available in the developing world, and declining birth rates.
   
   
7. One questioner asked about the distinction between intelligence and civilization - humans have had a "civilization" only since agriculture. This was a really original line of thought. Therefore, there could be many alien intelligences, but few or no civilizations. One solution for humans avoiding the Great Filter would be to abandon civilization and go back to hunting-gathering - not directly suggested, but this is the only implication of such an argument I could think of. The extreme number of assumptions built in to discussion of alien civilizations should always be pointed out - civilization is something that collections of human nervous systems do, and it is not clear it is a necessary consequence of intelligence. (As a physician I ask: do we assume the aliens will have similar EKG waveforms and liver enzymes as us? No, because that's ridiculous. So we do we assume that the even more complex activity of another organ, that we don't even share with other animals on this planet, is automatically going to be meaningfully similar?)

There's also a psychological point to be made about "big picture" arguments (the singularity, the Fermi paradox, the simulation argument, etc.) They have a tendency to converge on either prophetic religion-like conclusions (e.g. the singularity as the rapture for nerds) or Lovecraft (the estivation hypothesis, which was mentioned in a question and made me think about this.) When we talk about these things, there are many many unknowns. In such discussions, I think there is a tendency for the resulting arguments to resemble the internal contours of the human mind, more than any future events in the actual external world; hence their regression to religion-like conclusions. This does not mean such an argument must be incorrect, but it should make us suspicious when a big-picture argument hews too close to our "ontological test pattern. "

Consider in contrast cosmologists' models of the distant future of the universe, which concern physical objects which we can now observe and characterize, using rigorous mathematical rules. These models often seem boring, meaningless, difficult to understand, and unsatisfying. This is exactly how we should expect most models will seem of things outside our own and our ancestors' experiences, or beyond the scale of time and space to which we are accustomed and which we are built to perceive; the further outside their experience, the moreso. This occurred to me when we were discussing the estivation hypothesis, though overall Miller's arguments do not set off many alarm bells for this quick-and-very-dirty heuristic.

A Fun Game: Postmodern Writing vs. Written by a Human?

Please enjoy this postmodern text generator, in line with previous writings on Markov chains (here, here and here). This is sort of a reverse Turing test. If people in a given genre of academic writing are generating texts that can't be distinguished from Markov process outputs - and even the people who claim to most understand these kinds of writings can't distinguish them - isn't that kind of a reverse Turing test?

More Fun With Markov Chains - And Language Learning

This is cross-posted to my cognition and evolution blog.

Once I started playing with Markov chains I couldn't leave well enough alone, so I went back and played with Markov chains at the character level again, this time with several languages. As you add more elements to the state, the output text starts "looking more like" the language that it came from. To measure this, I checked to see if Google Translate's language autodetect could still tell what it was looking at. This led to a prediction about language learning.

Using the Spanish Wiki entry for Apollo 11, at a 1-character state out of 5 trials the computer thought it was seeing Estonian twice, and then Welsh, Irish, and Galician. Using the English Apollo 11 article, it thought it was seeing Welsh three times, then Afrikaans and Engilsh. With 2-character states for both languages, the translator guessed correctly 5 out of 5.

Then I pulled a dirty trick: I used Old English (from the introduction to Beowulf of course) complete with thorns and diphthongs, and used that as input. With 1-character states, the translator consistently thought it was seeing Welsh 5 for 5. With 2-characters, it still answered Welsh four times, and German once (remember, with the modern languages it could already reliably detect languages scrambled at this level). With 3-element states the translator said English twice, then Icelandic, German, and Welsh. Surprising that this was the first it responded with Icelandic, with all those thistles and thorns floating around.

Finally I started giving it blocks of unmolested Old English text. Unsurprisingly, it couldn't consistently say that this was an ancestral form of English (how many literate modern English speakers would, if they'd never seen it?) The translator said English three times and Danish twice. What!? We translator-Danes in the days of Markov! Feeding it full blocks of Canterbury tales, it had no problem seeing that Middle English was English.

Finally, using an online string generator as well as a little Excel function I wrote, I fed it totally random strings. The response was consistently Maltese.

Why Maltese? Maybe because of the X's, who knows. But I'm not trying to reverse engineer Google's translation engine. I'm more interested in whether its wild guesses on Old English and the low-element-state-scrambled Markov chains reveal something. One obviously is the possible relationship between languages; that Danish and Icelandic should appear in the translator's guesses with scrambled Old English is interesting but not surprising. But the preponderance of Welsh was also interesting. It's unlikely that the translator is noticing anything about a Celtic deep substrate of English, especially since it couldn't see the more recent Old English substrate of English! More likely there's something about Welsh that makes it a good guess in badly scrambled text, as possibly with Maltese. More sound combinations allowed? Lots of single-letter words? If this is true, then the languages that permit the most sounds and sound combinations will:

a) be the "last resort" guesses for translation engines, and

b) should take longer for children to start speaking.

Why b.? When children are learning their first language, imagine the difficulty of identifying individual words. All they're getting is a stream of sound. Now, when you learn a new word, you recognize the other words around it; not so when you're twelve months old. There is evidence that what kids are doing is trying to find word boundaries, and that part of the input comes from looking for sound combinations that appear less frequently, as in "worD Boundary" - English doesn't allow "db" to occur at the beginning or end of a word (although some languages do), but we allow d and b to run up against each other between words. In a language with sound combinations that are less constrained, it will be harder for kids to identify the word boundaries, and it will take them longer to start speaking. This prediction has verified parallels in morphosyntax. Cree and Fulani are notorious for being horribly irregular in terms of verbs and plurals, respectively. In most languages, children are proficient grammatically around age 5, but grammatical maturity is delayed in these languages for several years by the irregularities.

So my prediction is: if the orthography of Welsh and Maltese corresponds to their phonology and a less constraining set of rules about what sounds can occur together, then I predict that children's vocabularies will grow more slowly in those languages relative to most others. The most extreme would be Khoi-San, i.e. the famous "Bushman" click languages, which have the richest sound inventory of any language on Earth (not just the clicks). I'm not familiar with the phonology, just that their inventory is huge, and I'm presuming in my prediction that those sounds aren't severely constrained in terms of how they can appear in combination with each other.

Fun With Markov Chains

I give you Garkov, where the Garfield Comic meets Markov chains. Japanese T-shirt designers have apparently been using this process for a while.




From Coding Horror

While not as entertaining as the Nietzschean Family Circus, it's not without its charm.

At the letter-level you can play fun games with Markov chains - for example, coming up with similar-sounding but not identical names. I started by throwing in the top American cities. I got a few that were believable and coherent but not identical to the inputs (Bernard, Costa Maria, and Pennectico) but unless you have a large corpus, that boundary of coherent but not identical is pretty sharp. Even then you can still get some clever portmanteaus out of the deal: Thorntonio, Mobilene, and Charleston-Salem. Even better, there was an obvious name for a gay men's magazine about the scene in Alaska - Manchorage (I'm sure someone's ahead of me on that) and my personal favorite Markovian city name, Allen West. Going from 300ish city names down to 50 states gave only one novel one in a number of tries, Monsaskana, but a few clever portmanteaus, like Coloridaho, Florado, and my favorite, Tennsylabamaska.

From now on when I need something like this I'm going to automate it this way. For president names, no way, only forty-four of those. I did the same thing with another Markov generator which operates at the sentence level (far more interesting) and tried it on one of my own blog posts, where I discuss the zoo hypothesis response to the Fermi paradox. At a mere 367 words, using a 2-element state, it has the same problem of either spitting out the same sentences verbatim or giving sentence portmanteaus: That we've been staring them in the face the whole universe is A kind of frightening abjectly humbling realization is in fact the best case scenario I expect because it means they will seem incomprehensible if we even recognize them. (Compare to the original post.) It's more interesting but less coherent with a 1-element state: To spoil the whole universe is exactly what we haven't noticed aliens Ever try to do This wanting as alive even if they're trying to get our own ignorance. The Markov process is producing grammatical sentences even at this level, notwithstanding run-ons or semantic incoherencies, whether green, colorless or otherwise.

In case you wanted input text from a more middlebrow writer than myself, I used Hemingway's Old Man and the Sea for a bigger corpus and with 2-element states got a few nice ones: Now there was no one that they rose and they had razor-sharp cutting edges on both sides. Knowing it was a little later to save the blood in the sky. Borrow two dollars and a skiff in the bow he could not fail myself and die on A Monday morning. Strong enough Now for the fish made He was letting the current made against the line and he is too wise to jump. And then 3 elements: Shoulders and braced his left hand and arm he took the bait just now. The skiff shake as he jerked and pulled on the fish and he had found a way of leaning forward against the bow he could not remember the prayer and then He would say them fast so that they made a half-garland on the projecting steel.

J.G. Ballard had characters who were poets who spent their days programming, and they were celebrated for the brilliance of the verse that their algorithms produced. (To read this as dystopian is to oversimplify Ballard with assumptions he exploded - it was a challenge to artists. I.e., how is this not what you're doing, except you're using the hardware inside your skull, and you're not sure how it works?) While the text above isn't about to fool a publisher that you're in possession of a lost Hemingway manuscript, it gets you partway there. That is to say, if I were an undergraduate in some bullshit post-modern theory class I needed for elective credit, for my term papers I would get hold of a bunch of secondary literature, stuff it in the Markov meat machine, and then curate the sentences and use spell check to make sure it's coherent. That takes the concentration and understanding out of it; at that point you're just editing.

It's worth pointing out that humans differ in how easily they create new words like this, mostly because we're organized semantically rather than phonetically. It's not easy, at least for healthy people. If I ask you to name words that start with p, you'll start slowing down after 5-10 words, but if I ask you to name things that have to do with palace, you'll have a much easier time. In some pathological states, you can't help but make up words, like Wernicke's encephalopathy, but the words people make up still follow the rules of their native language. Interestingly, when people "speak in tongues" during religious ceremonies, the tongues in which they speak to their gods have the same phonological rules as their native one.

Of any statistical technique, Markov chains have most made me wish I was a programmer. For instance, it doesn't seem that it would be any harder to reverse this process to recognize affixes, rather than predict following character. That is to say: in English we use "-s" (or "-es") and -ing as suffices on nouns and verbs. In any corpus, these will appear more often than other endings, and they will be less predicted by the letters preceding them than other clusters. By doing this, you could feed a corpus in any language and it would be able to pick out the likely affixes and particles, based on these properties. In fact, it's not implausible that this is how children are decoding language when learning their first one.