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[Scoops Novel]

No one can build Von Neuman probes, because for that you likely have AI... and AI built is neutralized as soon as it reaches a certain point. No competition.

And they compete because, energy is at a premium in a entropic universe.

[Maximum Spin]

Did you just read A Fire Upon the Deep?

[dragdeler]

2036
It's the tenth year of the cyberdjihad.
The conflict is about to be won by the humans.
And I'm risking my life harboring backups of a few chatbots.

Spindlers list.

[Cthulhu]

Why would hyperintelligent AIs have a DMZ? They're smart enough to abut smoothly and in an entropic universe why would any space be wasted

Why do you keep posting threads

[Scoops Novel]

The possibility is there; half because of the unknowns in what they're technologically capable of, and half because the most likely AI is a buggy AI. A poor resolution process and mutually conflicting strange schemes to sidestep entropy has that potential to end up in a effective standoff.

[King Zultan]

Why do you hate AI so much anyway, did one kick your dog or something?

[MaxTheFox]

Novel is actually a scout sent by a hidden superintelligent manipulator AI to gauge how humans would react and try to deal with AI when it finally makes its move.

[EuchreJack]

... it's far more likely that our galaxy isn't full of Al because one large omnipresent and omnipotent Al is preventing it.

[Telgin]

Even if there were DMZs in the galaxy that separated alien species, it seems unlikely that we'd conveniently be located within one.

Besides, what would a DMZ even mean in this case?  Are the aliens forbidden from colonizing systems in the zone, or forbidden to even travel in them?  What reasons do they have to follow those rules?  Space is big, etc, etc, so it's probably hard to even know someone is exploring a solar system you don't want them to be in unless you're also there.  And if they were here and enforcing that, we'd probably know about it.

A more likely explanation to me is that alien probes with sophisticated AI probably just don't exist.  We could change the topic to exploring the Fermi paradox, but in short, I'm starting to come around to being in the crowd who believe that there may well just not be any species in the galaxy who are able to make interstellar journeys.  We may even be the most advanced species in the galaxy right now, and maybe even the first to get this far.

[jipehog]

Alternatively what if we are natural preserve, a zoo exhibit, or an ant farm of sorts. Please do not feed the Humans.

[Maximum Spin]

Even if there were DMZs in the galaxy that separated alien species, it seems unlikely that we'd conveniently be located within one.

This is actually a fallacious argument.

It seems highly unlikely that there would be a monkey in your house. However, if you see a monkey in your house, it doesn't follow from that that, since it seems unlikely that there would be a monkey in your house, it is more likely to be a complicated optical illusion. Given that you see a monkey in your house, and you're not on drugs, a monkey probably escaped from a zoo and really is in your house.

In other words, the likelihood of being "conveniently located" in a DMZ is totally irrelevant: we don't see any alien empires. Given that we don't see any alien empires, if you believe there should be alien empires, there has to be some explanation, however unlikely it might seem in isolation, why we don't see them.

I happen to agree that I think it's most likely that there just aren't any alien empires, but plenty of people believe (on extremely dubious reasoning) that there should be, and we have to treat the probability of explanations from the basis of the facts on the ground, not what we think the facts would be a priori.

To put it another way: If we knew for a fact that there were such DMZs, and we didn't see any aliens, the a priori likelihood that we would conveniently be located within one of those DMZs doesn't change - they take up the same amount of space regardless of whether they are hypothetical or proven and we have the same chance of randomly choosing that space if we threw a dart at the universe - but we would absolutely be justified concluding we were in one, because the posterior probability, as mathematicians call it, given that we see no aliens, is higher.

[MaxTheFox]

My take on the Fermi Paradox is twofold:
1. We might be the most advanced species in our neighborhood.
2 (and this is stronger). Civilizations aren't actually that easy to detect unless they are high up the Kardashev scale.

I don't think we have enough data yet to make a proper educated assumption about this. It's all wild guessing.

[King Zultan]

What if the reason we never see them is because they came here along time ago, realize we were boring and never came back.

[jipehog]

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

[Scoops Novel]

... it's far more likely that our galaxy isn't full of Al because one large omnipresent and omnipotent Al is preventing it.

The most likely AI is a buggy AI. We have to luck into a area of space where the first person to build one did it well enough to cancel out all competition, vs just being in a area of space where someone's shitty AI runs into someone elses.

Telgin, AI not aliens. What with Ryan Graves and Christopher Mellon and military footage, I'm a little leery of ruling out aliens, but AI are a question and not the same one.

AI could easily reach monitoring agreements which we'd never observe in our DMZ.