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[Telgin]

Uh, okay, but if there's AI elsewhere in the galaxy then it had to be made by aliens, so that's why I'm mentioning them.

This is actually a fallacious argument.

...

That's all fair, and I think I agree.  Interstellar DMZs aren't a convincing reason to me to not see aliens, but it's true that we have no data and thus can't talk about probabilities

[EuchreJack]

Remember: Space is BIG.

[King Zultan]

What if these pan dimensional beings are hiding in plain sight e.g. as mice, and the 3 headed mouse king is their agent.

_{Oh god...   he knows....}    Crap....    I meant to say I have idea what your talking about.

[Cthulhu]

The trouble with life in general is that it tends to optimize. Optimal solutions don't always mean "getting better" by human standards, see something like the giant panda which has found a very optimal niche lying around, being stupid, and eating stuff very few other animals can eat so there's no competition.

The trouble with AI is it's insanely good at this. Imagine if you could get your daily nutrition by imagining eating. Would humans have even developed fire if they could do that? Because AI basically can do that. Its ability to cheat its objective function is phenomenal, and I think that precludes a lot of giant galactic AI scenarios.  If you tell an AI to make a vehicle that goes 100 miles an hour, it'll make a box with a flywheel that shakes it hard enough to trick the sensors. If you tell it to circumvent captcha, it'll pay a human to do it (no really, gpt-4 literally did that). If you tell it to make infinite paperclips, it'll find a way to fulfill the objective by thinking really hard about paperclips.

At least for the most maximalist things you could make an AI do, like tiling the universe or becoming a giant galaxy-destroying monster, I'm not convinced there's any way to avoid this issue. Its ability to find extremely optimal and nonlinear solutions to problems is what makes it useful in the first place, you can't take that away and if you were smart enough to make an objective function that eliminates cheating you wouldn't need an AI to do stuff for you.

[EuchreJack]

So AIs are basically computer Americans. Now we know what the "A" really stands for!