Grabby Humans & The Idiocracy Heuristic

Speculation

About a year ago I met some of the kids doing AI alignment and fans of Scott Alexander. One of them was the guy I called Fearless Leader. He is a very competent martial artist and psychological counselor. I find him admirable. Every once in a while I like to poke fun at the Effective Altruists and their movement, and that is primarily because I have a non-trivial amount of confidence in the heuristic of Idiocracy. Let’s spell that out shall we?

Three Premises
First, let us acknowledge one of my perhaps unique insights to the IT revolution. There are more literate human beings on the planet than ever before. So there are, implicit in our fundamental desire to communicate, bound to be surprises in the complex dynamics of facilitating that communication. So let us say that the consequence of this facilitation is that the thing we call global media, including social media was inevitable - even though it hasn’t played out yet.

Second, let us acknowledge that basically it is unquestioned seriously that children are expensive in terms of time and the precedent is established that affluent people, with all due respect to Genghis Khan, don’t want them. Rich and powerful people don’t have time, only old money has time. Poor people very little disposable income or time, so for child-rearing they have time. So there’s a barbell curve, but poorer people vastly outnumber old money. Therefore it is always reasonable to expect what we see, declining populations in developed nations.

Thirdly, closely related to item 2, the nature of meritocratic power gradients have to supply a significant boost to get new talent time to maintain the status quo of old money. So the man with the future marries the daughter whose family has an elaborate past and variations on that theme. Here is the social crucible in which the longevity of institutions is determined by the ever present availability of Scooby Snacks. {scholarships, fellowships, internships, funding rounds, gifts, grants, sweepstakes & prizes named after Uncle Alfred}. If your institution is to survive the generations, you have to have sharp leaders who can distinguish themselves before they get too old, wise and cranky on their own. That’s my excuse, what’s yours? In other words, you need to get the Royal Seal before you pay off your own mortgage.

Grabby Aliens
Robin Hanson, whom I used to read a whole lot, has a conjecture and model of the Fermi Paradox he calls Grabby Aliens. The gist of it is that civilizations expand as much as possible and this is the way of life, to reproduce. This ultimately leads to the necessity of expansion of territory in order to acquire and consume the expansion of the population.

So he has simulated how, in a three dimensional volume of a galaxy, how intelligent life will inevitably(?) conquer various fractions of those volumes roughly as a function of the time it takes for them to achieve the technology of space faring.

For the sake of suspending disbelief I will ignore the fiction of Adrian Tchaikovsky who presents alien intelligences who would not necessarily be expansive. Consider, for example, an intelligent slime mold which has been sentient for 1 million years that spans a single world whose nutrients are capable of sustaining it for another 5 million years. Its perception of itself and of time are such that it has developed a philosophy entirely consistent with the planets seasons, which regularly destroy some parts of itself. The entirety of its continuous reinvention is to recover the memory, knowledge or experience of its seasonal dead.

Hanson presumes that another ‘grabby’ alien culture would eventually capture and reform such a world, but I imagine that such worlds could easily be impervious to such capture, rather like we remain vulnerable to certain biological agents or electromagnetic spectra. The concept of a civilization that can grab and sustain hold of a fixed territory resistant to all within it suggests to me that even the borders of one grabby civilization are permeable by the capabilities of another. Similarly human scofflaws fly below the radar of authorities. Are the possibilities of all human criminal genius fixed?

The probability that the Grabby hypothesis bears fruit can only be calculated on a timeline that exceeds our own lifetimes. Unless our panspermic parents have decided to rescue us from ourselves, the truth will remain out there beyond our reach and understanding. So in a Stoic way, it doesn’t matter who is right or wrong in this. I’ve never quite understood what kind of kudos cosmological prediction could reap. Then again, I know nothing about grant writing.

Panspermic Parents
So if you haven’t heard any theories of panspermia, let me tell you my favorite. Imagine that everything we’ve been saying about alien invasion, especially the Disney version starring Sam Jackson, is just dead wrong. Add to this confusion the idea the humans evolved from Olduvai Gorge somewhere in Africa is wrong too. Instead, consider the following mind blowing hypothesis.

We are not the original humans. Earth was terraformed by the original humans.

Let me elaborate on that a bit. What if humans were the equivalent of kudzu to an advanced civilization that had been keeping us around as pets? They could have rounded us up and landed half a million or so and put us into just the right size habitat and squirted us into an Earth intercept. We, some wheat and super mRNA vitamins crash landed with a big enough splash to drop the oxygen level of the cretaceous atmosphere and wipe out all of the super predators of that era. We survived in subhuman form with just enough latent mutagens that would ultimately manifest in some cranial magic. A couple million years later, voila! Earth is a croc pot for monkeys and some alien dropped us an evolutionary steroid catalyst.

OR

The humans that rode dinosaurs saw the comet coming, rocketed off to space and grew into the great space faring race we always dreamed of being. We sent our most violent criminals prisoners back to Earth to be minded by several minimum wage wardens who live in flying saucers that are underwater and undetectable. Occasionally they survey the planet and a few of their idiot great grandchildren got busted joyriding at Area 51.

We have met the alien enemies and they is us.

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The Idiocracy Heuristic
I’ve heard it said that in the Army you are going to be smart or you’re going to be strong. In other words if you don’t get it right the first time, your sergeant is going to make you do it over, plus 100 pushups and a 2 mile run around the camp.

Anyone who has seen the Idiocracy film become prophetic knows that it’s even worse. At least in that idiotic future, the men and women knew that they were men and women, not some Eloi on a genderfluid waterslide. Then again, all it takes is a real ecological disaster, economic collapse or genocidal military conflict for millions of humans to be reset from their flouncy projections.

We remain an imperfect species that doesn’t understand how it is that our own bodies work. We may have gotten the fundamentals of reproduction understood, but we don’t know how we think. There isn’t a complete theory born out by experimental confirmation. So we don’t quite understand the limits of the thinkable and what it might lead to. So we fall back to what we correctly intuit from evolution.

As I’ve said it another way, the human mind is evolved to solve pattern matching problems. When we don’t have problems our mind can solve, we dream them up and panic about it. Consequently, we get into rabbit hole problems which are divorced from reality, but not from the imagination of roving bands of political social animals vitally interested in investing in those dreamed up concepts.

This is why we screw things up, because we try to do things at scale. We’re trying to impress the masses of ourselves. This inevitably leads consistent concepts and their animated supporters into conflict, the most cleansing of which is war. Whereas two or three street brawlers can knock one another out in under 5 minutes, we can’t be satisfied without escalating conflict for the masses.

Herein lies the survivability and sustainability of the unsophisticated. They don’t know. They don’t care. They keep to themselves and don’t get involved. And they live in the hills and hollows which are easy to defend and difficult to make into corporate business parks.

So there is tension between ambition and self-satisfaction. That’s why I don’t hate yokels.