Alien intelligence and the concept of technology
This is bringing up a centuries-old issue of balancing innovation with social stability.<p>The term &quot;Luddite&quot; has incorrectly been attributed to suggest groups of people who &quot;fear technology&quot;.<p>When examining actual history, the Luddites never &quot;feared&quot; new technology, they simply asked a pertinent question to the times, a time when their trade literally took a lifetime to learn and master through a guild system, namely:<p>&quot;But what will happen to all our jobs?&quot;<p>The response was the same as during the Dot Com era that got turned into a meme:<p>1. Idea
2. &quot;Something something something&quot;
3. The innovators will make huge profits, and somehow you&#x27;ll all find new jobs<p>All the Luddites insisted on (and rightfully so) were the exact details of the &quot;something something something&quot; ... not in abstract economic terms, but in practical detail.<p>Not arguing for or against this, but it is a consideration to be taken into account.<p>For example, while researching electric cars, I came across a rather interesting entry: a Hyper Sports Car the size of a large sedan that gets its power not from  plugging into an electrical grid, but rather from saltwater: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thecoolist.com&#x2F;quant-e-sportlimousine&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thecoolist.com&#x2F;quant-e-sportlimousine&#x2F;</a><p>Now look at when it&#x27;s predecessor came out (I believe about 6-7 years ago).<p>What was even more surprising, but not a complete shock considering the prevailing dominance of the oil industry at the time, is that the first electric motors to run on sea water were PRODUCED during the time of Henry Ford&#x27;s Model T.<p>That&#x27;s right.<p>They not only came up with electric engines back then, but ones that ran on saltwater to boot.<p>Never mind what Tesla (the inventor, not the company) had in mind for public transportation.<p>To give a personal anecdote, circa I believe 2002 I was witness to a very bizarre series of events which I KNOW I can&#x27;t possibly be the only witness to as this happened live in real-time in front of who knows how many witnesses.<p>1. I woke up to the news on Yahoo (which was a respectable way to wake up back in 2002, not at all the tabloid-y joke it is today) that a small team of research scientists in Europe had not only achieved small scale cold fusion, they were able to do so in the space of a table top<p>2. They planned on making their announcement public by actually demonstrating it live, within the next I believe hour or two, on this relatively new internet format called &quot;live streaming&quot;<p>3. This seemed like such a remarkable thing, I did a Google search to see if I could find other outlets reporting this; it seems like everybody everywhere was reporting the exact same thing and many internet news sites planned on also hosting the live-streamed event.<p>4. I turned on the TV thinking &quot;surely the MSM news channels will be jealous of their internet peers and also find a way to broadcast this humanity-changing event live on TV&quot;<p>5. Instead, within half an hour ALL the news channels instead focused on live footage of an Israeli aerial raid, supposedly in retaliation for some rock-throwing something-or-other that happened well over a half a year prior<p>6. I went back to the internet sites bookmarked, and ALL of them &quot;suddenly had technical errors&quot;&#x2F;expired links&#x2F;unable to be accessed as the entire sites hosting the story were experiencing problems<p>7. I went back to Google hoping to find alternative places to watch the live-streamed event, only to find THE ENTIRE STORY had magically been scraped off the search results, &quot;as if it never happened&quot;<p>8. Over the course of the next few days, the movie &quot;Chain Reaction&quot; was played repeatedly on not 1, not 2, but 3 cable channels; Chain Reaction for those who haven&#x27;t seen it is a film that talks about just such a technological development, but with a twist: young research scientist Keanu Reeves is shocked to discover towards the end of the film that his own mentor has been systematically sabotaging his efforts (&quot;Do you have any idea what will happen to the global economy with the introduction of free energy?&quot;<p>Now, what is the point of this?<p>When you get to the second half of the writing he makes quite a bit of mention of the &quot;Ruliad&quot; and figuring out ways to abstractly understand it so that can be sort of &quot;reverse-engineered&quot; to help extend the physical &quot;real world&quot; aspects of it, for example in his case the idea of &quot;space colonization&quot;.<p>What if, taking the &quot;Chain Reaction&quot; example above, the whole situation was actually reversed – by alien civilizations with a more advanced ability to comprehend more of the Ruliad than humans, who for all we know not only do engage in space colonization, but have reached the conclusion that the best way to do it, as with lots of things humans are trying to do with lots of things these days, is to automate the whole process and not even bother physically showing up.<p>In other words, what if the aliens were sort of a Morgan Freeman in the Chain Reaction film and they were secretly, purposely sabotaging our further understanding of the Ruliad, ie, &quot;Can you imagine what would happen to the rest of the galaxy with the introduction of human beings?&quot;<p>ON TOP of all that, there is something that he doesn&#x27;t quite mention that I think is important: sufficiently advanced Ai in the brute-force processing sense.<p>Suppose for a moment money were no object and you created a facility the size of a small town that had pretty much nothing but quantum supercomputers all linked together in a parallel processing scheme; now suppose since money were not an object, you had, oh, 20 of these facilities all linked together - in part for security but mostly for sheer processing power.<p>Now suppose there was an Ai that using such a brute force processing set up were able to become of much more of this &quot;Ruliad&quot; than human minds could even comprehend, let alone process and make sense of.<p>How would such a setup then communicate its findings about &quot;more of the Ruliad than was previously known to humans&quot; back to humans?<p>To an extent there might be levels of &quot;dumbing things down&quot; so that human minds could better grasp whatever such an imaginary setup would find out about the rest of the Ruliad and it&#x27;s corresponding aspects of &quot;the reality we live in&quot; ... but at what point would such &quot;dumbing down&quot; become useless in effectively communicating to humans &quot;the rest of the Ruliad beyond the human brain&#x27;s ability to effectively process&quot;?<p>And THEN, there&#x27;s another thing to take into account: what if the nature of the Ruliad, once sufficient enough comprehension of it is achieved via orders of magnitude more processing power than usually available to human brains, what if it&#x27;s ... weird? Or even &quot;disturbing&quot; to humans?  Would you want to know such things?<p>The assumption is that further understanding the Ruliad will bring further understanding of the same sort of things humans are accustomed to, just &quot;more&quot; ... what if it&#x27;s not just &quot;more&quot; but &quot;on a different, bizarre, possibly disturbing&quot; level?<p>Like what if further understanding of the Ruliad reveals that your newborn baby&#x27;s diaper consumption is an exact function of the square of the distance between successive planets in a neighboring solar system divided by Pi? What if a deeper understanding of the Ruliad proves this beyond any measure of doubt?<p>Wouldn&#x27;t your next logical question be, &quot;Well hold on a second, my newborn consumes diapers based on when and how we feed them&quot; – wouldn&#x27;t the NEXT logical question be, &quot;Well if discovering previously unchartered aspects of the Ruliad proves beyond any measure of doubt that our newborn&#x27;s use of diapers IS an exact function of the square of the distance between successive planets in a neighboring solar system divided by Pi ... what does that say about when we as parents feed our newborn? Our we feeding them when they seem hungry? Or is our perception of our feeding them based on a combination of free will and when they cry out actually just yet another function of the Ruliad that we weren&#x27;t aware of before?&quot;<p>The ASSUMPTION seems to be &quot;the more we understand the Ruliad, the more we&#x27;ll be able to do what we as humans want&quot; ... but what if further understanding of the Ruliad reveals &quot;No! You can&#x27;t get more of what you want beyond your own planet - stay there and use what you already have to solve problems on Earth, and don&#x27;t bother hoping for more because this is all you get and you&#x27;re already not making very good use of it so nobody beyond your current comprehension will help you with more than you as a species already have because nobody trusts your species!&quot;