03. DR PHILIPSON, OR HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING ABOUT ALIENS AND STARTED TO GOVERN FROM MY SOFA
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Hear that? In the blink of an eye we could be not just contacted but overtaken by loud aliens. Are we on earth quiet aliens in the universe? What is the difference exactly between loud and quite aliens? And if we’re ever going to become loud aliens, traveling the cosmos, how would be manage such a civilisation-wide endeavor when we seem to only ever disagree, our history being mainly one of war and division?
Perhaps the Internet can offer a way to work together, to learn to be one world. Metagovernance could be one such tool to help us get there. In this episode Klang advisor Adam Philippson point John and Eva toward Robin Hanson about his latest theory of ‘loud’ and ‘quiet’ aliens, and Klang friends Prof. Laurence Lessig and Joshua Tan about the exciting possibilities of metagovernance.
Robin Hanson is an associate professor of economics at George Mason Univeristy. He is the author of The Age of Em: Work, Love and Life When Robots Rule The Earth, among other titles.
Joshua Tan is the executive director of The Metagovernance Project, as well as a practitioner fellow at Stanford’s Digital Civil Society Lab. He is also a doctoral student studying computer science at Oxford University.
Lawrence Lessig is the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership at Harvard Law School. He was also the former director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University.
[Whatsapp Voice Note Noise]
Adam Phillipson: John buddy. Yeah, Avi Loeb and his out-there ideas. I like them! ‘Rebooting earth’ - it’s not a bad idea. But. Yeah. Eh. I think there are several things to think about before that. Double back a bit.
[Whatsapp Voice Note Noise]
I suggest you talk to Robin Hanson. About loud and quiet aliens. Then Josh and Larry of course. You know, Metagovernance. How do you - I mean we - get data on what it's like to govern a moon or Mars colony?
[Whatsapp Voice Note Noise]
[Intro: The Life Cycle, a podcast about the future of humanity]
John Holten: Hello there, Eva.
Eva Kelly: Hey John.
JH: So yeah I just played for you a voicenote I got from friend of Klang Games, Adam Phillipson. And he just had listened to the rough cut of Episode 2, ‘Getting There’ with Avi Loeb and his ideas kind of far out there ideas about rebooting earth from some extra-planetary harddisk.
EK: And that was his response?
JH: Yeah, and it’s funny when he mentioned Robin Hanson, because, when Adam did I mean, because you and I actually talked about the ideas of Robin Hanson in season 1, when we looked at the idea of The Great Filter, as one answer to the Fermi Paradox.
EK: The Fermi Paradox is the weird fact that if the universe is teeming with life, why haven’t we come across it yet?
JH: Yes. But what we’re here to talk about today is Hanson has a new theory. And he’s this kind of funny guy who has a background in economics, and the social sciences, and applies them to, well, outer space. And he’s an associate professor of economics at George Mason University, as well as a research associate at the Future of Humanity Institute of Oxford.
EK: And what’s this new theory?
JH: Ah yeah, well it’s this idea of Grabby Aliens.
EK: That sounds kind of gross and a little rapey?
JH: [laughs] Yikes. Yes it does, it does, doesn’t it. I don’t know, it does sound a bit gross. And it’s always a bit obvious when you’re maybe dealing with somebody who’s a bit, I don’t know, of a different generation and not caught up with ‘the culture’. But anyway, to put it simply, and I’m reading from the official grabbyaliens.com website. Sounds like a website we all have to check out [laughs].
EK: [laughs] Wow, I can’t believe that wasn’t taken.
JH: Yeah, well, link in the shownotes everyone.
JH: But, okay, quote unquote, there are two kinds of alien civilizations. “Quiet” aliens don’t expand or change much, and then they die. We have little data on them, and so must mostly speculate, via methods like the Drake equation.
EK: Side note: we looked at the Drake equation in episode 2 of the first season, in case anyone listening wants to get into that. Because we’re not gonna do it twice.
JH: [laughs] No. Okay. And then “Loud” aliens, in contrast, visibly change the volumes they control, and just keep expanding fast until they meet each other. As they should be easy to see, we can fit theories about loud aliens to our data, and say much about them,
EK: Wait, so what are we? Are we loud or quiet?
JH: Well that’s what I started out by asking him.
Robin Hanson: Aliens first appear quietly. And then some of the quiet ones become loud. And we could ask, what's that ratio? That ratio is important for two things. One is it talks about our future, we're quiet now, what's our chance of becoming loud in the future? And the other is it speaks to how close might the nearest quiet aliens be. So the nearest loud one is roughly once per million galaxies, pretty long way away. But if they were, say, a million to one, quiet to loud, why then the nearest one might be one galaxy away or in our galaxy, even. But that would all say we'd have only a one in a million chance from this point to go on to become loud, which might be discouraging news about our future.
EK: It’s crazy that he got an equation to figure out these numbers. The likelihood of aliens appearing.
JH: Yeah it certainly is. It’s kind of mind bending. Cuz I then asked him about time, I mean, what are we looking at here. Keeping in mind that human civilisation as we know it has only been around for, I don’t know, is it 12,000 years? And that’s when we stopped being hunter gatherers.
RH: The key thing that you should ask is, why not believe that we're completely alone? So what we see is nothing, right? We see no aliens out there whatsoever. And I'm telling you, the nearest aliens are, you know, once per million galaxies, and you might think, how do we know they're that close? Maybe there's just nothing in the entire observable universe, there are no aliens, and we'll never meet any right.
RH: Isn't that consistent with what I just described? And it's not consistent with one key datum, which is the date on the clock. So we're in a universe now at 14 million years, but our universe will go on lasting for many, many trillions of years. And we could ask if the universe would just stay empty, waiting for us, what's the most likely time at which we would appear?
RH: So the average star will last for 5 trillion years, 1000 times longer than our star. And the power law model says that the most likely time for advanced life to appear would be toward the end of the life of the longest lived stars. And so if the power law is six, then the, the probability that it would appear at 5 trillion years rather than now is 1000, to the power of six, or 10 to the 18, which is, you know, really a large number.
RH: So, with respect to that prediction, we are crazy early. If the universe would just hang around waiting for the first advanced life to appear, then no other life would appear because it was just so empty, then when we should expect to apear is 1000 times farther in the future. And the chances of us appearing this early would be 10 to the minus 18.
RH: So the question is, then how do we explain how early and then the conclusion is, well, this assumption must be wrong, the universe won't sit and wait empty until we're ready to appear. In fact, there are aliens right now filling up the universe, and they've taken about half the universe so far. We just can't see them. But roughly half the volume of the universe is filled with vast, powerful alien civilizations that have changed everything. That's why there's a deadline coming soon. Pretty soon they're gonna fill up everything and then it'll be too late for civilizations like us to appear we have to appear now because there's a deadline coming soon.
JH: It’s kind of terrifying, to paint the picture he’s describing how loud aliens, because they’re loud, have the tendency to expand exponentially and ‘conquer’ everything in their path. And so this deadline Hanson mentions is almost the least of our worries when we think about the series of crises that we face, and other existential threats such as global climate change and what have you.
EK: Yeah, it really does make you think that we have to start thinking as one. Like how do we make those decisions or even respond to the threat of a loud alien civilistion, not just to the present day crises, but so that we can get our house in order to stay around long enough to meet the grabby aliens.
RH: I do think that in the long run, we will face this key choice about whether to be loud or quiet aliens. And I think it's not obvious what we will choose. I suspect, in fact, most civilizations don't choose to become loud, they choose to stay quiet. And instead of expanding and filling a billion light years volume, with their descendants and making big changes, they stay in one small place.
RH: I would be a little sad if that happened. But I think it's not crazy, that it would happen. And so I'm thinking about why we might do that. I think it's somewhat of having to do with that world community we discussed. The idea that we like a world community that has us all deciding things together. And it will be credited reasonably with heading off many, many major problems, perhaps global warming, inequality. You know war even will in fact, be greatly reduced by this world community and associated world governments over the coming centuries. And people will like that they will like having a world community.
EK: Okay, so, the first step to becoming “loud” is becoming one world right?
JH: Yeah, But then he actually runs with this, and it was here that the metagoverance that Adam was talking about in the voice note comes in: we need to start making some decisions about coming together, about how best to figure out what to do, as one world. But his way of bringing this up is something that kind of came to mind in the last episode, namely when we go there, go to deep space, whether that’s the Moon, Mars, or an interstellar exoplanet:
RH: And the key thing is that the moment you allow an interstellar colony to head off to another star, you end the era of a civilization wide community deciding things together. You reintroduce conflict and competition. And you open the door to these descendants becoming weird, evolving to become very strange descendants and then coming back to contest home with you. Those are the consequences of allowing interstellar colonisation. And I think maybe even the majority of civilizations will decline to do that. And we might decline that too.
EK: Wow what an image: so the space-goers get weird. And come back and mess with us.
JH: Yeah it kind of brings to mind how colonialism has played out in the past, in history. The colonies grow up and, in the case of for example something like independence, and then democracy as a concept, in the USA vis a vis the UK and France. How a ‘new’ world’ updates and modifies an ‘old’ world. The kids grow up and then come home to roost, as it were. But the idea of other worlds than our immediate one, came up when I next talked with Joshua Tan and Lawrence Lessig, friends of the podcast who also were guests on Season 1. They work on something they call Metagovernance, or virtual governance, which I started out by asking them both about when they were here in Berlin last summer:
Joshua Tan: Maybe the best way of describing it is metagovernance is the governance of many worlds.
EK: Ok, so but, worlds that exist online or digitally, and that don’t necessarily have an existing structure. So if you think of working from home, for example, you're doing remote working but the company you work for already has a set-up, so you kind of know how to translate that to online communication. But with metagovernance, we’re talking about governing communities for example, without any existing structures rooted in physical reality.
JH: Yes. It’s like we’re simulating not only becoming loud aliens, but also how we might learn from such a new world. It’s quite an image or idea really, isn’t it?
JT: It's kind of a model we use when describing why we built our project. So, think about it like this, on the internet, there are lots of ways having a community, operating an online community of any sort. Whether it be a forum, whether it be a guild, an online game, or even, you know, some of these newfangled things in crypto and web three, like Daos for decentralised autonomous organisations.
JT: And all these things exists not because you know, people gather naturally online with their you know, natural rights of, you know, collection and community. But because the designers of the systems said it would be so. They designed it so that you can interact with other people on the internet with these platforms and form communities that way. And meta governance is really a way of describing what are the constraints and affordances for creating community and for creating governance.
JT: That is, you know, that is presented by these tools. And secondarily, it's a way of thinking about what is the relationship between different kinds of governance in different communities, different institutions that arise from, from these tools from these architectures. The key question, you know, like, if you're thinking like, what's important about this concept is, how do I design new ways of building community? How do I build infrastructure and architecture that helps us build better communities online?
EK: So this is why Josh and Larry were at Klang this summer, right? To think about this infrastructure and architecture for online communities?
JH: So Laurence Lessig teaches a course on this - Metagoverance - at Harvard, and I asked him first off:
JH: So yeah, do you want to talk about what virtual governance is to someone who doesn't know anything about it?
Laurence Lessig: Yeah, I like to get people to think about something everybody is familiar with, which is the process of making a commitment to somebody.
JH: Yeah, Umm, Lawrence Lessig is a consultant for SEED, the game that Klang Games is making. And SEED, we should just point out, for those of you that don’t already know, is a massive game that simulates the future of humanity. Players are sent to a new planet with the goal of creating new groups, societies, and indeed setting up alternative community structures. So it really kind of relies, heavily, on metagovernance.
LL: You know, we can agree to have lunch. And that process of agreeing is you and I make a decision that we're going to pick a time and a place and express a mutual obligation to show up at that time in the place. That process is one we're all familiar with. But it creates something of value in our lives, which is something we can rely on, depending on how much you trust somebody else. The process of governance in the real world, and also in the games, is basically that process, but multiplied and extended to a much bigger, collective or group of people. So how can we build the technology to enable, not two people to come to an agreement, but 100 people, or 10,000 people? And how can we make it so that they understand the obligations they're creating, in as intuitive a way as they understand the obligation to meet me for lunch next Thursday? And that's, that's the challenge, to keep it as simple and obvious and natural as possible, while making possible something much more ambitious about the idea of of governing, especially in the context of a virtual game.
EK: So it should be fun, like a way to cooperate together to get things done.
JH: Yeah it’s a really interesting premise. He also points out that this shouldn’t be a chore, it’s not like it should devolve into political science.
LL: Now, it can't get in the way of the game. This is not political science, 101, we're not trying to teach people how to run a government. This is not for the purpose of anything, except making the game an even more compelling experience. But in a game like seed, where the whole project is the project of developing and encouraging and empathizing, with this world of seedlings, we thought it was a necessary addition to that process. To be able to enable players and seedlings in this sense to create their own world of obligations and see what kind of settlements they can develop out of those obligations.
JH: Because there's action in a game, I guess. Whereas, like a social media platform is more of just communication. There's maybe not quite the same need for a rule set that's dynamic or…
LL: Let's say that you and I are playing in a settlement, and I'm trying to create, build a factory to produce furniture. And I have a certain number of seedlings, but I don't have enough. So I want to be able to rely on you providing me with 10 seedlings every day to help in my factory. So, you know, I could try to persuade you to do that. But if I really need to depend upon this, I might want to create a contract and agreement, a commitment.
JH: This is where it becomes really fascinating. And Josh and his Metagov associates, together with Larry, have built what they call a commitment engine. Allowing for groups of people to make decisions, commit themselves and carry out actions as a group, even though they may be 1000s of kilometres apart.
EK: …Or even on another planet?
JH: Yes…Or even at the polar ends of this planet and deciding to do things together…on another planet.
EK: Uuuuh.
JH: But not just that, there are uses for this type of tool in our everyday lives, which I think it’s safe to say we realize more and more we need since, I dunno, say 2016? [laughs] Uhh, yeah.
LL: You know, if we could find ways to virtually bring people into a same room, where they've been exposed to information, a common set of information. And they have a chance to look each other in their vert in their virtual eyes as they engage about the topic, we know, from many examples that they actually can understand and deliberate about those topics in a constructive way. So the only difference between this is not the people, the difference is the architecture for enabling them to engage.
LL: And I think that that should drive us to think how do we architect the space to bring the best out of people, rather than the worst out? And obviously, it might be that you make more money, the worst you make the environment. So Twitter and Facebook, they profit enormously from turning us into crazy extremists. Because the crazier we are and the more extreme we are, the more we engage, and the more we engage, the more money they make. So their business model trades on us being crazy.
LL: Too bad for us. But that's, that's how they're trying to make money. But if you can begin to make a platform, which I imagined, SEED is going to be a platform like that, where there isn't profit to be made from turning people into crazy people. The profit is to be made from people wanting to devote time and they want to devote time, to the extent you can make this into a meaningful, interesting, subtly complex environment. And I think that's part of the objective of the tools that we're talking about building.
EK: Thanks for listening, and thanks to our guests Robin Hanson, Josh Tan and Laurence Lessig
JH: This episode was written, John Holten, with additional writing by Eva Kelley.
EK: Sound editing and design by David Magnusson
JH: Mundi Vondi is our executive producer. He also created the artwork for this episode, in collaboration with Midjourney.
EK: Additional research, script supervision, and fact-checking by Savita Joshi.
JH: Follow us all the on social media and subscribe wherever it is you listen to your podcast.
[Adam Phillipson: Yeah I’m super glad you got to talk to them. I think that’s so interesting right? That you can imagine learning, as a connected, global civilization, learning and cooperating with one another. Yeah, whatever. Are we still on for drinks later?]