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Eliezer Yudkowsky's avatar

I think the basic challenge to this scenario - and I'm not saying it's an unsolvable challenge - is that if Alpha lies on the border of Beta and Beta says "I have early history for sale from Gamma, do you want it?" then Alpha's willingness to pay Beta is capped by Alpha's trust that neither Beta nor Gamma just made up the data. If you don't believe in logical decision theory, then Alpha is willing to pay at most a bit less than the amount it would cost Beta or Gamma to fake the data indistinguishably to Alpha; depending on the data, this may be less than the cost to Gamma and Beta of transporting the data to their borders for future trade.

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turchin's avatar

There is a way to do it. They first need to attract our attention, then send a blueprint of computer and then a program for it. I even wrote an article about it: "The Global Catastrophic Risks Connected with Possibility of Finding Alien AI During SETI"

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