Why we shouldn't fear our alien overlords: Comparative Advantage

http://weirdthings.com/2011/01/well-make-great-pets-why-we-shouldnt-fear-our-new-alien-overlords/

by amayne • 16 years ago

23 23 16 years ago

RobertKohr• 16 years ago

The article that was posted before was bs. Thanks for coming up with a rebuttal.

alexophile• 16 years ago

Of course, there's a great comparative advantage in forcing a lesser being to work for no pay. Also, what about the scenario where we are the resource? Best case: Matrix; more likely: extinction (if they could sustainably cultivate people, they wouldn't have crossed the galaxy to find us)

highfreq• 16 years ago

I'd be particularly worried if our lower horns were the resource.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Fry

amayne9• 16 years ago

Very true.

amayne9• 16 years ago

Comparative Advantage increases prosperity for all when both sides can reinvest and become more efficient and more productive. That's why industrialized China is a better trading partner than a non-industrial China was.

Coerced, uncompensated labor diminishes the upside. That's one of the economic reason why Europe and later the US moved away from slavery. It also decreases your market for your products.

yummyfajitas• 16 years ago

Slavery was economical for the slaveowners [1]. Agriculture wasn't economical relative to industrialization (which is why the economy of the US South sucked), but that was a separate matter.

Slavery was abolished primarily due to the religious beliefs of assorted evangelical Christians (quakers, baptists, methodists), not for economic reasons.

[1] If you ignore the utility function of the slaves, slavery is economically equivalent to robots.

alanh2• 16 years ago

Terrible article. What the hell is a “secular zealot”? And why is proofreading considered something no one has time to do anymore? Hint: Rationale ≠ rational; you’re missing the word “century,” and no one in the world uses this supposed “citation style.”

amayne9• 16 years ago

Secular zealots: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_party

alanh2• 16 years ago

Are you kidding me? Socialism is NOT secularism!

Edit I’m objecting to the article pretending that secular zealotry is a thing like socialist zealotry or religious zealotry. Secularism is never itself a cause for zealotry. And the article even implies those who are passionate about secularism despise individuality. Absurd.

lucasjung• 16 years ago

A very rational intelligent species might go out of their way to exterminate other intelligent species. The logic goes something like this: The resources of the galaxy may seem vast, but on a long enough timescale they are finite and will eventually become scarce. On such a long timescale, any other intelligent species has the potential to compete with us for those resources. If we lose that competition, we could be driven to extinction. Best to pre-empt competition now while we have the upper hand

The Greg Bear novels The Forge of God and Anvil of Stars dealt with this scenario.

amayne9• 16 years ago

I loved those novels. I think the thing that gets lost is that we usually imagine aliens as only incrementally more advance than us - like comparing an aircraft carrier to a Viking longboat. I think a species capable of interstellar travel is going to have a much greater technological advantage over us. So much so that we won't even look at the same things as resources.

Our biggest ideas like Dyson spheres and space elevators are concepts based on an early 20th century way of looking at things.

What's a civilization that can manipulate matter like energy (i.e. "matter" lasers) on a routine level or has advanced forms of nanotechnology or picotechnology capable of? I have no idea.

If we start noticing stars vanishing because they're tapping them for energy, then I'll worry. Otherwise I don't think our rock is worth much other than entertainment value.

bluekeybox• 16 years ago

> If we lose that competition, we could be driven to extinction. Best to pre-empt competition now while we have the upper hand

What's even scarier is that the most rational choice may be to pre-empt even if resource competition is unlikely to ever occur, just because pre-emption on the part of another civilization has a non-zero probability.

Basically it's the Cold War logic except with no diplomacy and with the other side's strategy likely to be guided by a strong post-Singularity AI.

Thinking through these scenarios can be scary as fuck, but since we're all still alive and well, it could be that we are truly alone.

snorkel• 16 years ago

"we still have value we can bring to a superior civilization. That value may be in providing services, cheap labor or producing reality television."

... or we may just have really delicious brain stems.

amayne9• 16 years ago

True. My biggest fear is that they make an alien version of the documentary The Cove about what happened to earthlings...

jacques_chester• 16 years ago

Aliens wouldn't invade Earth for resources, because they can get far more, for less effort, by mining the asteroid belt, the Kuiper cloud, the Oort cloud, the gas giant systems etc etc. Schlepping down the Earth gravity well for a tiny fraction of the minerals on a piddly rock is not worth the bother.

bumbledraven• 16 years ago

What's the comparative advantage between a human and a hog? The same relation may very well obtain between a superintelligence and a human.

Why we shouldn't fear our alien overlords: Comparative Advantage

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