What first: FTL Travel or True AI?

[[DHT]Osiris]

Human level and above human level AI will be first. That should be coming in the next 20-50 years. FTL travel will take longer and if humans are still around then the AI will probably help (or on its own) design and create it.

This wouldn't surprise me one bit. Basically our 'AI' ends up usurping us, and becomes the next stage of our 'evolution' (kinda playing fast and loose with the word there). Ends up building the future of humanity, technologically, socially, etc.

 

[cbrunny]

BORG!

 

[Paratus]

I personally feel that FTL travel (if it can even exist in our reality) is dependent on a 'clutch', or some singular discovery/invention/'one neat trick!' that just sorta unlocks it. A lot of sci-fi incorporates this (the Mass Effect is a good example), and it's basically the Deus Ex Machina of sci-fi/science fiction when it comes to this kind of thing.

AI seems to be entirely incremental, baby steps moving forward until we finally 'level up' to the AI, probably from some final discovery/really novel programming method.

There was a hilarious short story by Harry Turtledove called "The Road Not Taken". It dealt with the FTL armada of an alien empire who arrives in our system and after detecting no signs of hyperdrive or gravity manipulation realize the Earth is ripe for conquest.

The story becomes absurd when the aliens land and engage the national guard with matchlock rifles and black powder bombs. The national guard responds with automatic weapons, tanks, missles and jets.

As it turns out gravity manipulation and hyperdrive doesn't require more than a 16th century level of technology to create, (go FTL with this one simple trick!). The technology didn't have any other applications or lead to any other scientific breakthroughs. So most species who reached that level stopped doing science and ended up exploring or in galactic conquest.

Humans on the other hand somehow just missed the technology and in doing so took "the road not taken". The road where we learned electronics, medicine, agriculture, computers, and nuclear weapons. When the captured alien survivors realize just how far ahead of them we are and that they just gave us the keys to the galaxy they shit themselves.

 

[cbrunny]

There was a hilarious short story by Harry Turtledove called "The Road Not Taken". It dealt with the FTL armada of an alien empire who arrives in our system and after detecting no signs of hyperdrive or gravity manipulation realize the Earth is ripe for conquest.

The story becomes absurd when the aliens land and engage the national guard with matchlock rifles and black powder bombs. The national guard responds with automatic weapons, tanks, missles and jets.

As it turns out gravity manipulation and hyperdrive doesn't require more than a 16th century level of technology to create, (go FTL with this one simple trick!). The technology didn't have any other applications or lead to any other scientific breakthroughs. So most species who reached that level stopped doing science and ended up exploring or in galactic conquest.

Humans on the other hand somehow just missed the technology and in doing so took "the road not taken". The road where we learned electronics, medicine, agriculture, computers, and nuclear weapons. When the captured alien survivors realize just how far ahead of them we are and that they just gave us the keys to the galaxy they shit themselves.

I don't know that one but I'll check it out.

 

[Red Squirrel]

The issue I see with FTL travel is a tiny spec of space dust would wreck the whole ship, and you would probably not be able to detect it before it's too late. But any such tech would probably be more advanced than simply going really fast. Maybe somehow find a way to open portals or something.

That said I think AI is probably what will happen first, AI is more or less really advanced conditional structures. You can get it so advanced that it will feel like an intelligent system. That seems fairly plausible with the tech we have now. Self aware and adaptive AI is where things get really more involved though.

 

[cbrunny]

That said I think AI is probably what will happen first, AI is more or less really advanced conditional structures. You can get it so advanced that it will feel like an intelligent system. That seems fairly plausible with the tech we have now. Self aware and adaptive AI is where things get really more involved though.

Is it though? I know that most things humans do can be boiled down to super complex IF THEN statements, but I think there's more to it than that. Almost like the irrationality of humanity. IF THEN statements would not capture irrationality unless it was programmed, and the act of programming it would make the irrationality rational. I suggest that what you are suggesting is not True AI.

This of course says nothing of a sense of self, or sentience, or the like.

 

[BarkingGhostar]

Considering the average intelligence of humanity I would say reaching for AI is a goal set pretty low.

 

[imported_tajmahal]

AI will be first and we'll regret it second.

 

[SMOGZINN]

Personally I think FTL is impossible because of the energy requirements to accomplish it are simply to great. Accelerating past the speed of light is clearly impossible, so we have to find some 'trick' to bypass space or achieve speed with out acceleration. While some tricks like that exist they all require energy levels much beyond what could be harnessed. The amount of energy available in a local area is limited, and getting enough of it together to do something like bend space probably requires you to already be able to travel faster than light.

AI on the other hand is more or less inevitable. Mattering on your definition of AI we are already rather close to it. I wouldn't be surprised to wake up any day to hear the news that some group somewhere has what they believe to be a fledgling AI.

 

[Sonikku]

Warp drive won't happen until after world war 3 when zefram cochrane invents it.

 

[[DHT]Osiris]

There was a hilarious short story by Harry Turtledove called "The Road Not Taken". It dealt with the FTL armada of an alien empire who arrives in our system and after detecting no signs of hyperdrive or gravity manipulation realize the Earth is ripe for conquest.

That story sounds awesome. 99.9% of sci-fi stories involve aliens having greater technology than us on all fronts, I like the idea of them never developing gunpowder, or ablative armors, rocket propelled explosives (or explosives in general). Really the entire impetus of our weaponry and (arguably) spaceflight came from the discovery of gunpowder. If an alien species discovered that 'one weird trick!', they might invade other planets with hand-to-hand weaponry.

The issue I see with FTL travel is a tiny spec of space dust would wreck the whole ship, and you would probably not be able to detect it before it's too late. But any such tech would probably be more advanced than simply going really fast. Maybe somehow find a way to open portals or something.

I always assumed FTL travel would involve more wormholy/subspace kind of things. Brute-forcing does cause the exact problem you describe, the energy collisions with individual atoms would eat away at the structure, and a micrometeorite would be like firing a rail gun round through the hull.

Is it though? I know that most things humans do can be boiled down to super complex IF THEN statements, but I think there's more to it than that.

The problem that computers/programmers have always had was choice/randomness. There's no real way to tell a computer to 'just do something, figure it out'. There's a part of our brain that sidesteps the whole IF THEN paradigm and just *chooses*, intentionally or unintentionally, rationally or irrationally. Its pretty much the 'consciousness', what we call choice or random, and what defines a living brain from a computer. An AI needs to be able to do the same thing, and under any circumstance. I think the best indicator that something is an AI is when asked about something that it doesn't know about, it can say 'I don't know' *without* that being an if/then statement. Without it pushing through a relational database and arriving at 'no response available -> GOTO line 10,000,000' and returning a flat response. It needs to come to the 'I don't know' conclusion based on the fact it doesn't know. That's really hard.

Personally I think FTL is impossible because of the energy requirements to accomplish it are simply to great.

I'd be careful with that. While true there may be a limit to the amount of energy that can be concentrated into one place, that's assuming a) we know everything about energy and the universe, and b) the only way to do it is with more energy than can exist in said space. Those are really heavy assumptions, akin to a bronze-age alchemist determining rockets were impossible because that much gunpowder in a tube would simply explode. Not enough data yet to state definitively *what* FTL would require.

 

[Mike64]

Those are really heavy assumptions, akin to a bronze-age alchemist determining rockets were impossible because that much gunpowder in a tube would simply explode. Not enough data yet to state definitively *what* FTL would require.

^ This

Seriously speaking (and not that we've realistically been at it very long in the historical scheme of things), we still know barely anything at all about the fundamental "nature" of matter and (and/or) energy (and/or the relationship between them...)

 

[SMOGZINN]

That story sounds awesome.

It is a pretty awesome story, not very long either. I think if you search online you can find it. I think IO9 might have published it as one of their Lightspeed stories of the week a few years back.

I'd be careful with that. While true there may be a limit to the amount of energy that can be concentrated into one place, that's assuming a) we know everything about energy and the universe, and b) the only way to do it is with more energy than can exist in said space. Those are really heavy assumptions, akin to a bronze-age alchemist determining rockets were impossible because that much gunpowder in a tube would simply explode. Not enough data yet to state definitively *what* FTL would require.

We are getting a pretty good understanding of the universe on a theoretical level. We are pretty much now just learning new things about quantum effects that probably can not interact with things as large as an atom, much less a spacecraft. We are definitely not at the bronze-age alchemist level of understanding the laws of the universe. There is no magic unobtainium that will make FTL travel easy.

 

[SMOGZINN]

^ This

Seriously speaking (and not that we've realistically been at it very long in the historical scheme of things), we still know barely anything at all about the fundamental "nature" of matter and (and/or) energy (and/or the relationship between them...)

I'm always amazed that people believe that we don't have a fundamental understanding of the nature of matter and energy and the relationship between them. That is what Einstein's famous equations describe.

 

[[DHT]Osiris]

We are getting a pretty good understanding of the universe on a theoretical level. We are pretty much now just learning new things about quantum effects that probably can not interact with things as large as an atom, much less a spacecraft. We are definitely not at the bronze-age alchemist level of understanding the laws of the universe. There is no magic unobtainium that will make FTL travel easy.

I'd normally agree, but we're still bumping up against things that are pretty close to 'unobtainium' levels of weirdness to us, like the EM Drive. Might totally be hokum, but support and evidence is growing. Now that may end up being more of a one-off instead of 'all the everything we know about physics is wrong' kind of thing, but how many other one-offs are there? Conservation of energy is pretty much your baseline for physics, or at least one of them. To find out that something can get around that is a Big Deal (tm).

 

[Darwin333]

AI for sure. We just don't really care about space travel anymore so even if we came up with a FTL drive tomorrow it would be 30 years before we actually built it and got it in space, at least. NASA gets one half of one penny of our tax dollars and a ton of people think that we spend way too much on space. Personally I would love to see what they could do with a whole penny.

Just for reference, the last manned US space flight was in 2011 and the current projected next US manned space flight will be in 2023, that's 12 years. We went from not knowing the first thing about rockets or even space to building the most powerful rocket to this day and putting a man on the moon.

 

[Mike64]

I'm always amazed that people believe that we don't have a fundamental understanding of the nature of matter and energy and the relationship between them. That is what Einstein's famous equations describe.

"Fundamental" doesn't mean "simple" or "superficial". Are you aware, as I am not, that Einstein (or anyone since) ever secretly was/has been able to formulate the Grand Unified Theory he was after? (Or conversely, that such a concept provably does/can not exist, and what else explains stuff like, you know, gravity and quantum mechanics...?) When I wrote "fundamental", I didn't mean "the beginnings", I meant a real, thorough understanding of the even the basics of the subject. Surely you can't be suggesting we have that now, can you?

 

[cbrunny]

Are you aware, as I am not, that Einstein (or anyone since) was/has ever been able to formulate the Grand Unified Theory he was after? (Or conversely, that such a concept does/can not exist, and why, and what else explains stuff like, you know, gravity...?) When I wrote "fundamental", I didn't mean "the beginnings", I meant a real, thorough understanding of the subject. Surely you can't be suggesting we have that, can you?

fundamental and thorough are antonyms.

 

[Mike64]

fundamental and thorough are antonyms.

I guess some people use them that way (either just incorrectly, or in casual speech), but they aren't, really. Not even according to Merriam-Webster, which is among the more "descriptive" (vs "prescriptive") English-language dictionary publishers, i.e.:

Fundamental:
1 a:  serving as an original or generating source :  primary
  b:  serving as a basis supporting existence or determining essential structure or function :  basic
2 a:  of or relating to essential structure, function, or facts :  radical; also :  of or dealing
      with general principles rather than practical application
[...]
4  :  of central importance :  principal
[...]

"Simplistic" and "superficial" are antonyms of "thorough" (with different shades of meaning), and relatively speaking (again, in the historical scheme of things) I think at least the former of those two would be a not-inappropriate word to describe our current state of knowledge of the "nature of matter and energy and the relationship between the two".

 

[SMOGZINN]

I'd normally agree, but we're still bumping up against things that are pretty close to 'unobtainium' levels of weirdness to us, like the EM Drive. Might totally be hokum, but support and evidence is growing. Now that may end up being more of a one-off instead of 'all the everything we know about physics is wrong' kind of thing, but how many other one-offs are there? Conservation of energy is pretty much your baseline for physics, or at least one of them. To find out that something can get around that is a Big Deal (tm).

Not really, though. Every physicist I know or have read any writing on has all said the same thing about the EM drive, that what is interesting about it is that we are learning that some of our testing methodology is flawed. Basically no one thinks it is actually producing thrust, only that our testing methodology is showing it producing thrust, which probably means that our testing methodology is flawed somehow. All the 'NEW SPACE DRIVE!!!1!ONE!!' is all click bait and bad science reporting sensationalism.

"Fundamental" doesn't mean "simple" or "superficial". Are you aware, as I am not, that Einstein (or anyone since) ever secretly was/has been able to formulate the Grand Unified Theory he was after? (Or conversely, that such a concept provably does/can not exist, and what else explains stuff like, you know, gravity and quantum mechanics...?) When I wrote "fundamental", I didn't mean "the beginnings", I meant a real, thorough understanding of the even the basics of the subject. Surely you can't be suggesting we have that now, can you?

We are a lot closer to these things then you seem to imply. Having found gravity waves means we now know that the 'gravity is caused by the shape of space-time' theory is probably correct. We have several competing theories on quantum mechanics as well, and the experiments going on at CERN is narrowing those down.

Every new thing we do learn makes FTL travel seem less likely not more.

 

[ImpulsE69]

It still boggles my mind how 'slow' FTL is due to the sheer MFing size of the universe.

It is this right here that makes you sit and wonder WTF is the universe about? Where did it come from, why does it exist? Even if we are the ONLY living creatures out there and we happened purely from randomness of chemicals, it still doesn't answer WHY the universe exists in the first place. And if we ARE the only things out there....wtf?

 

[Mike64]

Every new thing we do learn makes FTL travel seem less likely not more.

Well, I'll readily concede that mine is more of a broad(er) philosophical difference of opinion rather than a specific fact-based one, but I guess I'm just not as willing to assume/necessarily believe that we know as much as we think we do. History has proven us wrong so many times before that the general subject of our understanding of things is one I tend to tread very lightly around, personally...

 

[cbrunny]

I guess some people use them that way (either just incorrectly, or in casual speech), but they aren't, really. Not even according to Merriam-Webster, which is among the more "descriptive" (vs "prescriptive") English-language dictionary publishers, i.e.:

Fundamental:
1 a:  serving as an original or generating source :  primary
  b:  serving as a basis supporting existence or determining essential structure or function :  basic
2 a:  of or relating to essential structure, function, or facts :  radical; also :  of or dealing
      with general principles rather than practical application
[...]
4  :  of central importance :  principal
[...]

"Simplistic" and "superficial" are antonyms of "thorough" (with different shades of meaning), and relatively speaking (again, in the historical scheme of things) I think at least the former of those two would be a not-inappropriate word to describe our current state of knowledge of the "nature of matter and energy and the relationship between the two".

whatever. This thread has been too good to argue semantics. No need to start now.

 

[cbrunny]

Every new thing we do learn makes FTL travel seem less likely not more.

Taking this at face value, it would also suggest that a folding of space-time, or some kind of sub-space movement would be the requirement. That is, it is most likely not thrust based. If it were, it seems to me we would have some data confirming that something, anything, has traveled faster than light to this point. Even if it were at the subatomic level, which to my mind would be most likely.

Either that, or figure out how to make objects have no mass. And if you can do that, if there's some imaginary negative mass concept... crazy to think about. I'm not a physicist. thank god.

 

[Mike64]

whatever. This thread has been too good to argue semantics. No need to start now.

Oh please... Would you have preferred my just saying "you're wrong", and perhaps asking if English were your second language? Or are you actually claiming to have a more than a basically simple understanding of the "nature" of matter and energy? If so, stop wasting your time posting here and get on the horn to Princeton, the Max Planck Institute, CERN, and/or any number of institutions that are no doubt dying to hear from you...