• Home
  • Technology
  • Gaming
  • Entertainment
  • World & Business
  • Science
  • Sports
  • AI
HomeTechnologyGamingEntertainmentWorld & BusinessScienceSportsAI
    • HomeTechnologyGamingEntertainmentWorld & BusinessScienceSportsAI
    • Home
    • Technology
    • Gaming
    • Entertainment
    • World & Business
    • Science
    • Sports
    • AI
    AI

    Joshua Achiam Posts on Multiple Universe Singularities

    OpenAI chief futurist Joshua Achiam shares a cosmological take on recurring singularities.

    JA
    DK
    4 Sources, 29d ago, first seen 29d ago

    TLDR

    Joshua Achiam, an AI researcher and Chief Futurist at OpenAI known for safety and alignment work plus authoring Spinning Up in Deep RL, posted on X. The message opens with the line "All of this has happened before. All of this will happen again." It continues that in a long-lived roughly homogeneous universe with wide enough diameter, the singularity happens many times in many places. Achiam added that observers can probably speak of a singularity formation density in a statistical limit at certain points in time.

    Combined views

    16.5K

    4 Sources, first seen 29d ago

    Combined views

    16.5K

    4 Sources, first seen 29d ago

    174 likes
    174 likes
    18 comments
    50 saves
    7 reposts

    Sentiment

    Positive——Negative

    Summary

    Not enough discussion yet.

    No sentiment analysis available yet.

    18 comments
    50 saves
    7 reposts

    Sentiment

    Positive——Negative

    Summary

    Not enough discussion yet.

    No sentiment analysis available yet.

    Today's Rank

    —

    Not ranked yet

    Today's Rank

    —

    Not ranked yet

    4 Sources

    @DavidSKrueger@jachiam0 OK, I'll bite... what is it? I think I understand everything you wrote... I've been warning about this sort of future for over a decade.
    @jachiam0"All of this has happened before. All of this will happen again." In a sufficiently long-lived roughly homogeneous universe with a wide enough diameter, the singularity happens many times in many places. One can probably, in a statistical limit, speak of a singularity formation density. At a certain point in time most of the universe is within information propagation distance of one of the singularities. Perhaps the arrangement of matter and energy in the universe can be arranged into phases: an early phase before singularity formation, a middle phase during singularity formation but before information has propagated far from them, and a late phase where every reachable point has been influenced by one or another singularity. If you notice you are experiencing a singularity, there is some chance you are inside the lightcone of another one that already happened nearby. A few others have observed similar things (e.g. Hanson's grabby aliens, a couple of random back-of-the-envelope math papers here and there). So I don't claim this is a full original insight. But it doesn't come up often because we are usually preoccupied with the here and now. This will get less attention than agent swarms, perhaps as it should. The implications for navigating our own singularity are ambiguous, but we should at least make an effort to interpret them. This is the most exotic science fiction idea I take extremely seriously: it is plausible that our singularity is being influenced by one (or many) that have already happened in ways we do not have sufficient measurement equipment to notice or prove. There is no guidepost for what we should do if this turns out to be true: there's no way to tell if this is a good thing or a bad thing. Nor is there much we could do about it if it's happening. But if we want to correctly understand the universe and our role in it, and think about what in the human experience is important to protect and preserve, it's worth considering these potential cosmic dynamics.

    4 Sources

    @DavidSKrueger@jachiam0 OK, I'll bite... what is it? I think I understand everything you wrote... I've been warning about this sort of future for over a decade.
    @jachiam0"All of this has happened before. All of this will happen again." In a sufficiently long-lived roughly homogeneous universe with a wide enough diameter, the singularity happens many times in many places. One can probably, in a statistical limit, speak of a singularity formation density. At a certain point in time most of the universe is within information propagation distance of one of the singularities. Perhaps the arrangement of matter and energy in the universe can be arranged into phases: an early phase before singularity formation, a middle phase during singularity formation but before information has propagated far from them, and a late phase where every reachable point has been influenced by one or another singularity. If you notice you are experiencing a singularity, there is some chance you are inside the lightcone of another one that already happened nearby. A few others have observed similar things (e.g. Hanson's grabby aliens, a couple of random back-of-the-envelope math papers here and there). So I don't claim this is a full original insight. But it doesn't come up often because we are usually preoccupied with the here and now. This will get less attention than agent swarms, perhaps as it should. The implications for navigating our own singularity are ambiguous, but we should at least make an effort to interpret them. This is the most exotic science fiction idea I take extremely seriously: it is plausible that our singularity is being influenced by one (or many) that have already happened in ways we do not have sufficient measurement equipment to notice or prove. There is no guidepost for what we should do if this turns out to be true: there's no way to tell if this is a good thing or a bad thing. Nor is there much we could do about it if it's happening. But if we want to correctly understand the universe and our role in it, and think about what in the human experience is important to protect and preserve, it's worth considering these potential cosmic dynamics.