Fermi Paradox 2.0

ST1: The very existence of the human race is endangered. Humans have created an artificial habitat that, on one hand, is too comfortable, too stable and too predictable for people to retain their skills of coping with uncertainty. On the other hand, it grew so large and complex that humans can’t manage it any longer without the skills of coping with uncertainty. Our social adaptation for the last ten thousand of years was going in the direction of more predictable, more automated behaviour, I would say, because it fits best to the habitat we were building. Our civilization was moving ahead fast. Now it abruptly entered a zone of turbulence. Skills to cope with uncertainty are urgently needed to adapt to it. What can we do satisfy this need? It is crucial for our survival to find the way out.

LS: Our ancestors knew how to cope with uncertainty. They stored and shared this knowledge in the form of fairy tales. Storytelling evolved at the same time with speech. The magic represented in fairy tales the unpredictability of nature. Tales taught humans that bad magic could hurt anyone at any time but good magic helped only those who were simple and curious and only if they were taking actions. It’s exactly what we need to cope with uncertainty.

NC1: Indeed, storytelling we need to couple our brains for coordination of the complex behavior that we need to cope with uncertainty.

CS1: Storytelling is a strategy of communicating tacit knowledge as the one that we need to cope with uncertainty.

NC2: Stories appear to be a fundamental way how our brain organizes information in a practical and retrievable manner.

NC3: It means consciousness is learned from stories too. If consciousness, as we think, is the brain’s non-conceptual theory of itself then it is gained through experience interacting with the world, with other agents, and, crucially, with itself that is organized in the form of stories.

LS: I have to stress out that we need not just any fairy tales. We need only the best fairy tales. People have the hope and the belief in miracles stored on the level of their instincts. Lately science and technology took over the role of magic and miracles but we still believe that some magical forces will save us. Only the best fairy tales teach us that each of us personally have to act to find these magic forces and to make them work. Many stories, unfortunately, now teach people only to wait and see how somebody else will come and save them. Now it seems that even in scientific circles people tend to believe that the general artificial intelligence will come and save us all by solving all our problems. Others are fearing that it will destroy us.

CS1: By artificial intelligence we mostly understand self learning machines which are becoming smarter as we improve their self-learning algorithms, as their computational power grow and as they learn more by themselves. We can make them learn from stories too. The challenge of building a conscious artificial intelligence is great but there are also smaller problems which we can resolve this way. As the use of artificial intelligence becomes more prevalent, and as artificial intelligence becomes more capable, the consequences of its actions become more significant. Enabling artificially intelligent agents to learn complex human behavior from stories may be the most expedient means of better integrating them into human society and making them contribute to our overall wellbeing.

NS1: Brain coupling simplifies our understanding of behaviour. Our first experiments in this area were based on storytelling too. Then we discovered that it worked in nonverbal communication, in joint actions and in joint decision making too. I wonder if humans and AI agents can couple their ‘brains’ too?

ST2: The challenge of retelling the best fairy tales is that their characters are ‘conventional stock figures,’ their action unrolls extremely fast fast, they have only the most obvious imagery, and after all the best tale should sound great from the mouth of the least adequate teller.

LS: We need many tales like that to tell in different ways about the same things. Repetition of the same tales which only differ in forms of presentation will not help us to cope with uncertainty. Tales need to be unpredictable at the level of actions not presentation.

ST1: Well, we can create an open world game that will generate as many different stories as we want, which all will be based, however, on the same set of rules, which people need to share for successful coordination of actions among individuals for complex behaviors, which are required to cope with uncertainty. This open world can be managed by the confluence of human crowdsourcing and artificial intelligence.

CS2: What if the mankind would migrate into the artificial open world of the game and expand there instead of expanding into the real universe? It would be the safest and the most energy efficient option. By staying in the real world people may well destroy themselves and the planet a global nuclear war after the global warming will accelerate their fight for land and resources.

AF: It might be another explanation of the Fermi Paradox. We hadn’t discover any alien races in space because all advanced civilizations sooner or later ended up with building their own universe instead of expanding into the one in which they were born. Maybe, they all started with a computer simulation created to regain their skills of coping with uncertainty but eventually turned the simulation into something similar to the universe as we know it; the universe that organises itself into particles only when it gets observed and disseminates into waves again after the observer turns away?

CS2: I guess, the same effect can be achieved if we decide to augment the physical reality with the artificial one. It’s an interesting challenge to create such a game.

ST1: We are already building the augmented reality that you are speaking about when we use microscopes, telescopes and all the instruments to observe, measure and reproduce various processes in real nature. However, I believe that we may never find the answer unless we try. Let’s make the game and see!

A dissonant chorus of voices responded: Let’s make the game and see!

***

The video file of this conversation was found by the research team that first hacked the human genome as a source of hidden non-biological information. The file was encoded in genes. Researchers retrieved it and rendered to the computer. They didn’t find any information about the participants of the conversation neither about the origin of the recording.

An advanced speech analyser assigned the following roles to the participant of this discussion:

ST — storyteller

CS — computer scientist

LS — linguistics scientist

NS — neural scientist

AF — astrophysicist