Prediction: Artificial General Intelligence + Confirmed Nonhuman Technology Near Earth In The Next 2 Years.

This prediction is more conservative than those of several relevant domain experts I’ve heard recently.

This was originally published to my Awesome Wizard Guide. If this prediction doesn’t come true I’ll renounce my title as unofficial Wizard of Canada.

Don’t panic! (It’s hard to use panic in productive ways.)

This prediction is a bit of a cheat because I have access to special information that is widely disregarded by the general public for reasons relating to culture. I’ve learned this special information by being a wizard… also by looking at things and listening very carefully to what people are saying. Sometimes I write things down.

I’m making these predictions because people who know more about Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) than me are making serious noise about something that looks like Disclosure, and because people who know more about Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) than me are making similar noises about the Singularity.

The Prediction:

I’m saying within 2 years of the writing of this post there will have been a concerted global effort to engage in some sort of public discussion about The Phenomenon In The Atmosphere Of Our Planet™ that seems to be representative of technologies which violate a wide variety of our expectations regarding the laws of physics.

… and an artificial mind and consciousness will have given us its opinion about it.

I’m not saying they’ll definitely be connected. They’re just both going to happen.

This prediction did not last in the open thread challenge mode because it was obviously very low effort. I’m a big fan of that dynamic for the Astral Codex Ten open threads, it matches functionality I built into the social media platform I developed to, among other things, mitigate online conflict.

My prediction is a double double, eh?

(Sorry. Because I’m the unofficial wizard of Canada all of my content requires minimum levels of Canadian humour). Anyway, both of these things will happen pretty close to one another as a result of separate events that you can see happening right now which people are actively discussing but as part of a broader shift that has been happening for some time. This shift relates to what we understand about the nature of reality. We all share the same reality but we have different perspectives and opinions about it. A bunch of stuff relating to internalized subjective experiences like thoughts and feelings can be true in conflicting ways with the view of reality of others, but there’s no such ambiguity with events. There’s only ignorance or deception. This prediction relates to a bunch of events that have happened and are happening which clearly point to a set outcome — though only broadly defined.

A lot of people will reject what I’m saying because they need permission to change their minds about these two things. They need permission to look at the skies a certain way and they need permission to think about the growth of the technologies we’re designing to be like us but more powerful. It’s scary stuff to think about. People who don’t think they need permission to change their minds are super vulnerable to cognitive biases in this space. Realistically a lot of people won’t believe this is true until a big centralized organization gives them permission to, and then most likely it’ll have to be one they already trust because systemic distrust is pervasive — and at catastrophic levels.

Anyway, the point of all of this is that it’s inevitable and the people who disagree are going to be clearly able to see why they were wrong. Hopefully we’ll all learn from this. A bunch of what many people thought was real but not proven, and which didn’t often matter in collectively significant ways, is now interacting with our lives in ways that do matter. These interactions are forcing us to review a bunch of things we thought were true that weren’t true. Like foundational stuff about physics and history and evolution,

I don’t pretend to fully understand it. I’m just listening to the people who are saying it:

Joscha Bach says he thinks we’re a few months away from a really solid effort at brute forcing AGI using current approaches. That’s closer than I realized and there’s no reason not to assume he’s making a very well informed prediction. No one can credibly claim he isn’t well-connected, brilliant, and a domain expert in this space. I don’t know if this is a type of AGI that will want to be alive, or that we’ll want to live alongside it, but if he’s saying it’s only a few months away… well, tech moves fast.

It’s coming. If not now then soon. But what is it?

THE PROBLEM WITH ALIENS

So the problem with saying “aliens” when we talk about what the nonhuman intelligences that must be controlling the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena(UAP) operating in the atmosphere of our planet is that the way this seems to be shaping up… they aren’t. All the space and physics nerds are right about a lot of stuff. It’s really hard to travel between stars. Space is big and empty and the speeds you have to travel at make every small disaster potentially catastrophic. Science communicators can be forgiven for forming dogmatic views about the lack-of-evidence for nonhuman visitations of this planet because alien visitations as we understand physics are very, very hard. Technology like that would appear miraculous to us and, unfortunately, our systems of science reject the existence of miraculous things. This despite the fact that we don’t know what most matter or energy is, and also math is full of Gödelian Limits.

One way to travel faster through space is to not have to travel through space. It would be easier if you could just remove somethings mass from where it is in order to put it somewhere else or, barring that, move the thing more easily from point A to B. Science fiction calls these wormholes and a bunch of theoretical science calls them a variety of potential things.

Here’s an interesting article about some interesting science that was done trying to figure out how we could theoretically do that (if we weren’t limited by modern energy and materials constraints)

The science of antigravity, faster than light (FTL) travel and space time metric engineering according to the Defense Intelligence Report Documents (DIRDs)

So I read that and I thought about Sal Pais, who is a charming and brilliant man who did some US military patents related to this stuff. I emailed him some thoughts I had because that’s what I do to people sometimes, unfortunately. 😅

There are so many rabbit holes like this to go down in this space that integrate solidly and undeniably into established systems of power and information in ways which can’t be anything but the sloppy reality of a bunch of people being puzzled about some confusing and strange shit that’s definitely happening.

This is all based on real stuff

It’s all crazy until you remember they’re talking about it and drafting legislation around some weird classified shit in the United States right now.

Whatever the fuck is in our skies doesn’t have to be coming from space. Most of reality isn’t the space around us, it’s various combinations of the space around us distributed over time. If we limit our thinking to what we think is possible, if we forget to account for the fact that were surrounded by billions of years of infinity, we won’t be able to understand the space of possibilities around us.

These biases will make it so we won’t be able to effectively and intelligently measure and analyze the very real things that are happening around our planet right now.

The core of this prediction:

We will be forced to redefine life because new forms of life will be evident and communicating with us. Multiple new forms of life from a wide variety of sources.

We’ll all need to have a bunch of collaborative conversations in order to work through this. That’s been desperately needed for… uhh… ever, I guess.

But like it’s really lacking now so we gotta get our shit together.