A renowned computer scientist who's spent his career proving AI is mathematically uncontrollable just told me aliens — if they exist — are biological AI von Neumann probes, and that we might be the probes.
Then physics broke his argument.
@RomanYampolskiy is the AI safety researcher who coined the term and put his P(doom) near 99%. We cover: why metal robots lose to biological ones across galactic distances, the panspermia twist that makes humans the experiment, the Jupiter-brain problem that forces any superintelligence to fracture into rival superintelligences at the speed of light, and the simple physics objection no other podcaster has put to him — the first AI was not made with an AI. The aliens, if they come, are someone else's superintelligence.
This discussion explores the intersection of superintelligence, extraterrestrial life, and physical constraints. The speakers debate whether the existence of biological alien remains would disprove the inevitability of AI, suggesting instead that such beings could be engineered \"biological robots\" or von Neumann probes sent by a distant superintelligence.
If we had definitive proof of alien technology visiting the
earth extraterrestrial, I'll leave aside the simulation
theory, we'll come back to that. But would that be sort of an
argument against super intelligence, right? Because
supposedly, it would be universal, it wouldn't just be
human, they would be, you know, Proxima Centauri would have the
same level of technological ability, and they would
eventually hit the singularity themselves. Right? So why would
they be sending, you know, meat sacks, or whatever, you know,
protoplasm across the galaxy when they could be sending AI?
And why are they saying these crafts here? In other words, is
the claim if it were true, of a definitive hardware with
biological material in it that's been called non human by by Air
Force, and CIA and other government officials? Would that
not be sort of a counter? Would that be a piece of, you know,
falsification, maybe perhaps to your hypothesis?
So when you say biological, you assume that biology can only
come from non intelligent design, I think biological
robots are very natural next step in robotics. Okay, metal
robots don't do well in many environments, you want something
which is a von Neumann probe capable of adaptation and
evolution locally. So I think the aliens, if they do visit,
and we capture them, are products of artificial design
and engineering, not native population, which created them
long time ago, they probably had to deal with advanced
technology probably hit the great filter just as we have.
And what we're seeing now is their super intelligence
sending von Neumann probes towards us. And our theory is
says, panspermia, we have a probes, they send us here to
populate this rock.
Yeah, that brings me to my favorite panspermia, a bit of
artifact, which I'm going to give to you, Roman, when I see
you in person, there's a meteorite, and you get a real
honest to goodness meteorites older than planet Earth. It's
4.4 billion years old. And you get a get one guaranteed if you
like Roman live in the United States. And if you have a dot
edu email address, go to Brian King comm slash edu. And Roman,
I'm going to send you one of these, I get your address after
the show. And it's a real honest to goodness. And it has
biological material on it. And so that kind of brings up this
point. But one of the things you're
to ask how it got there. I'm not gonna
I can't divulge my secrets, but it'll get to you via the US
Postal Service, which is why I can only send it in the US. And
if you don't have a dot edu, I do give them away randomly to
people that go to Brian King comm slash yt. So Roman, past
guests, Nick Bostrom, anytime past guests, I have to brag a
little bit to you because you're so, so impressive. But I got
from Nick Bostrom's most recent book, digital utopia, I think
it's called it came out two years ago, I got you know, I got
a copy of the book in the mail, I got a lot of these, you know,
as hosting a podcast, you're a successful podcast host. Now
not yet. Yeah, well, it should come soon. Your growth is
astounding. And we got to continue to get you monetized.
But but I got from his publicist, I got the book and
then these pieces of paper, I have one here from a recent
guest, Peter D. Amanda's who came on last week. But anyway,
I'm looking through it. And I'm reading the thing. And it's
like, eventually goes, yeah, Nick Bostrom has appeared on
the Joe Rogan experience. Cool. The Lex Friedman podcast, and
into the impossible with Brian Keating. And I'm like, well,
that's pretty good company to be in, you know, the he was
bragging about, but I told him, as I'm going to say to you is
famous paperclip problem. That's all fine and good. You know, if
you live on an infinite planet, but we live on a planet which
has a limited amount of this stuff. This is iron, nickel and
cobalt, and you'll get the assay the chemical spectrum of it when
I send it to you. This object has has, you know, the remnants
of a type two supernova. And its elemental composition is, you
know, 1,000th of a percent of what makes up the mass energy
density of the universe. And this is a, this is more rare
than, you know, than 190 IQ human being on Earth by 10
orders and five orders of magnitude. So my question to you
is what I posed to him, I mean, you will reach some level of
constraint on these things that they have, they maybe will not
have agency of because they cannot engineer planets, you
know, an age, like, I would say an operating system wasn't made
with an operating system. The first computer was not made with
a computer, the first AI was not made with an AI, right? So to
what extent do fundamental physics limits cosmological
astrophysics? Do they constrain the superintelligence? I'm trying
to make you relax a little bit Roman constraints on the growth
and the danger that these superintelligence present?
Yeah, that's a great question. And it's been looked at. I think
people research what is called the Jupiter brains, really large
hardware devices specifically made to be superintelligent. And
the problem they encounter is speed of light, different parts
of the Jupiter brain need to communicate to be a unified
whole, if the distance between them becomes so large that it
takes a significant amount of time for them to communicate,
essentially, you have more and more two independent
superintelligences. And this can be taken to extreme, if they no
longer communicate, they become misaligned over time. And so now
you have multi superintelligence system, possibly adversarial. So
another example would be if humans and when Norman props to
our planets, they spend billions of years developing there, and
those aliens would later come back to conquer Earth, they no
longer follow our orders, they're not aligned with us. So
I think the safety and security, their concerns come from just no
longer having initial alignment of a single unified entity.
