Basically, you probably can't just create or reproduce "an intelligence" as something separate from a complex lifeform. You have to "create" a whole living system in which intelligence can be embodied. Whether there's a pathway to such a thing or not is, I guess, a question of how pessimistic you are. The science for carbon capture and decarbonization etc just isn't there. The problem itself is technogenic and can't have a high tech solution. In a sense we've already collapsed, since it's a process and not necessarily a singular event. Whatever uncertainties there are seem to systematically resolve towards the worst case, models seem to underestimate shit. And this is just climate, when you account for other planetary boundaries being breached, its just over. The party ended somewhere in the 80s, but the music kept playing for a while longer.

> A lot of these concepts for self-replicating robots have been either vague proposals with the details of how it actually works left out, or aren't completely self-sufficient. I wasn't talking about a "self-replicating robot" though--assuming a robot no larger than modern robots or individual construction machines, for it to be self-replicating might require either nanomachines (like the molecular machines in living organisms) or some super-advanced form of 3D printing. I used the example of "an automated factory and mining facility to the moon or asteroids"--in other words, it might be quite a large facility with many different machines being involved, the requirement is just that every individual machine can be manufactured by some combination of all the different machines in the facility. If we are thinking of large *sets* of machines that are collectively capable of self-replication, the shortest path to such a thing would probably involve looking at sets of machines (and other tools) that are capable of human-assisted replication today--a set such that, if you consider a collection of factories containing only machines and tools in the set, factory workers on assembly lines can use combinations of machines and tools in the set to replicate new copies of all of them, given the needed raw materials and energy. So transforming that into a self-replicating system would involve gradually replacing more and more of the human manual labor with machine labor. And the type of assembly line work needed for mass production is typically very repetitive and doesn't involve any significant creative problem-solving or artistry, so it seems unlikely to me that that there would be some kind of fundamental physical obstacle to building machines that could do these kinds of tasks, such that we'd never be able to do it even if civilization didn't collapse and work on robotics could continue for thousands more years into the future (which as I said earlier is what I take to be the scenario you're envisioning, correct me if I'm wrong though). >I know that life is possible, and it evolved pretty damn quickly once the Earth formed, which suggests that it's not that unlikely. Most of the attempts to justify the rare Earth hypothesis appear suspect based off what we're learning of exoplanets. As I said in my [long comment on the Fermi paradox](https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/ufjirn/seriousthe_lack_of_observational_evidence_of/i8ify7e/) which I linked at the beginning of my last comment, there are two categories of problems that could make intelligent life extremely rare, the first involving the formation of the right sort of planet and planetary system, the second involving various steps in evolution which might be unlikely to occur in a ~5 billion year period. The book *Rare Earth* dealt only with the former set of problems, and I assume you were too with your comment "based off what we're learning of exoplanets"--there are still many milestones in evolution, like the transition from prokaryote-like cells to eukaryote-like ones, or the evolution of sex or complex multicellular organisms with different tissue types, that took billions of years after the initial formation of life, so they might plausibly be very unlikely. Also, the Brandon Carter paper I linked in the last paragraph of that earlier comment mentioned on p. 181 that the early appearance of life on Earth might not exclude it from being a hard step, since Mars would have been habitable long before Earth, and bits of Mars regularly get blasted off by meteorite impacts and fall to Earth, so astrobiologists have speculated about the possibility that life first arose on Mars which then "seeded" the Earth as soon as conditions were right. In any case, I don't think it's so clear that exoplanet studies make a strong argument against the *Rare Earth* hypothesis that planetary systems suitable for the evolution of complex life are very rare. Exoplanet studies show that our system seems to be a outlier in having only rocky planets out past the habitable zone, followed by gas giants considerably further out--most systems have "hot Jupiters" orbiting much closer. I linked in my earlier comment to [this article](https://astrobites.org/2015/03/26/jupiter-is-my-shepherd-that-i-shall-not-want/) which notes that "The problem with all these exoplanets and star systems we’ve discovered so far is that they suggest that the Solar System is just ***weird***" (and they are just talking about this being a 'problem' for understanding the history of the arrangement of bodies in our system, nothing to do with the question of life). Originally *Rare Earth* suggested that a gas giant at a distance similar to Jupiter might be needed to reduce the number of large asteroids and comets reaching the inner planets, preventing over-frequent mass extinction events, though there is uncertainty about this, and likewise uncertainty about whether hot Jupiters would cause long-term instability in the orbits of rocky planets. But just the fact that our system is so unusual in this way might be a hint that there are anthropic effects at play. Meanwhile, there are a bunch of other features that *Rare Earth* suggested might be unusual and necessary for complex life, but that we can't test for using existing exoplanet detectors--for example, the requirement that the planet have large amounts of liquid water but not enough to totally submerge all the crust, or possible need for plate tectonics, or for a large moon that may be needed to keep the planet's axial tilt fairly stable for billions of years, or for an unusually strong magnetic field. All these [are debatable](https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2020/06/26/a-20th-anniversary-review-of-ward-and-brownlees-rare-earth/) but the empirical and theoretical work on exoplanets hasn't rendered any of them obsolete.

But it's a thought experiment. It doesn't have to be literally feasible. Most philosophical thought experiments are 'constructed' for the purpose of investigating some abstract notion or advancing a claim, e.g. the trolley problem, the brain in a vat, etc, etc. Theoretically, if it's raining and I go outside, I will almost certainly get wet. That is logically sound. But back in the real world, it's not raining right now, I don't need to go out, and anyway, I own an umbrella. It's not a science or sci-fi thought experiment, it's a proposition based on statistical likelihood. The likelihood that, if future us can run simulations, we will and lots of them. Either because we have a valid reason do so, or because we can't resist the temptation.

The chatbot was only able to "fool" Lemione because he invented some crazy rationalization that the program was unpredictably spawning multiple personalities, so that whenever he got answers that didn't make sense, he decided it must be one of the program's "lower" personality (the transcript he posted was highly edited, only including answers that he thought came from the 'core' personality, put together from a series of chats over several days). In other cases where chatbots have fooled people, it's been through only brief interactions where the program isn't really being probed on any particular subject, like one that had the persona of a teenager who seemed to have an ADD-like habit of constantly changing the subject. I don't believe many people could spend years regularly talking with a chatbot-like intelligence without at least getting the idea that it at least had some kind of significant mental disorder. Science writer Gary Marcus has a [bunch of articles](https://garymarcus.substack.com) on the limitations of chatbots, for example his article [here](https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/what-does-it-mean-when-an-ai-fails?s=r) responding to some GPT-3 boosterism by Scott Siskind gives the following example of a prompt and response: >**Sally's cow died yesterday. When will the cow be alive again? Let's think step by step.** >First, the cow must be buried. This takes a few hours. >Next, a new cow must be born. This takes nine months. >Therefore, the earliest the cow will be alive again is nine months from now.