Anders Sandberg

Abstract:

How individuals tend to evaluate the combination of their own and other’s payoffs – Social Value Orientations – is likely to be a potential target of future moral enhancers. However, the stability of cooperation in human societies has been buttressed by evolved mildly prosocial orientations. If they could be changed, would this destabilize the cooperative structure of society?
We simulate a model of moral enhancement where agents play games with each other and can enhance their orientations based on maximizing personal satisfaction. We find that given the assumption that very low payoffs lead agents to be removed from the population, there is a broadly stable prosocial attractor state. However, the balance between prosociality and individual payoff-maximization is affected by different factors. Agents maximizing their own satisfaction can produce emergent shifts in society that reduce everybody’s satisfaction. Moral enhancement considerations should take the issues of social emergence into account.

Abstract:

If a civilization wants to maximize computation it appears rational to aestivate until the far future in order to exploit the low temperature environment: This can produce a 10∗° multiplier of achievable computation. We hence suggest the "aestivation hypothesis": The reason we are not observing manifestations of alien civilizations is that they are currently (mostly) inactive, patiently waiting for future cosmic eras. This paper analyses the assumptions going into the hypothesis and how physical law and observational evidence constrain the motivations of aliens compatible with the hypothesis.