Eliezer Yudkowsky

And what they would be seeing was that I had correctly understood them, but not that I was similar to them.

Ask Robin Hanson.

He has this lovely, grabby aliens paper, which is more or less the only argument I've ever seen for where are they, how many of them are there, based on...

A very clever argument that if you have a bunch of locks of different difficulty and you are randomly trying keys to them, the solutions will be about evenly spaced, even if the locks are of different difficulties.

In the rare cases where a solution to all the locks exist in time, then Robin Hanson looks at the arguable hard steps in human civilization coming into existence and

and how much longer it has left to come into existence before, for example, all the water slips back under the crust into the mantle and so on.

And infers that the aliens are about half a billion to a billion light years away.

And it's quite a clever calculation.

It may be entirely wrong, but it's the only time I've ever seen anybody even come up with a halfway good argument for how many of them, where are they?

If it ends up anywhere, it ends up at AGI.

Maybe there are aliens who are just like the dolphins.

And it's just like too hard for them to forge metal.

And, you know, this is not, you know, maybe if you have aliens with no technology like that, they keep on getting smarter and smarter and smarter.

And eventually the dolphins figure, like the super dolphins figure out something very clever to do given their situation.

And they still...

end up with high technology.

And in that case, they can probably solve their AGI alignment problem.

If they're much smarter before they actually confront it because they had to solve a much harder environmental problem to build computers, their chances are probably much better than ours.

I do worry that most of the aliens who are like humans, like a modern human civilization, I kind of worry that the super vast majority of them are dead.

given how far we seem to be from solving this problem.