
What if the aliens we are seeking are AI? - otoolep
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20160922-what-if-the-aliens-we-are-looking-for-are-ai
======
mathattack
It seems strange to make a distinction between organic and created by organic.
At an advanced enough stage, couldn't any AI look organic to us?

My take...

1) Over the span of our development, our technology development would look
like uncomprehensable magic to someone 1000 years ago. Our ancestors from
100,000 years ago would find us uncomprehensible. Galactic time horizons are
billions of years. The odds of our finding life who could comprehend us (and
us them) is miniscule.

2) It's hard to fathom the listening not being automated, and using AI.
There's just too much space to listen to.

~~~
ganeshkrishnan
My thoughts exactly. How do we even define "Artificial"? Heck, we can't even
define "consciousness" properly.

Is a turtle artificially intelligent? What if a Chimp had titanium atoms
instead of carbon? Would that make it AI?

Overall I think it's an absurd question because right now the definition of
"AI" is something that we/humans have created. Everything else is natural
intelligence.

A question of vernacular.

~~~
kobeya
It matters, and here's why: natural intelligences, reasonably defined as
intelligence evolved through natural selection, can be expected to have some
convergent properties. The convergent instrumental goals of resource
acquisition and self-preservation naturally arise, of course, but the same is
probably said of artificial entities too. Naturally evolved intelligences on
the other hand are very likely to have moralities of a recognizable (even if
foreign) sort -- the Pareto optimal solutions to resource sharing problems
encountered in their ancestral evolutionary environment which likely resembles
ours in important respects. These are, in the words of Daniel Dennett, "forced
moves" which any evolutionary process is likely to stumble upon regardless of
lineage. Artifacts, on the other hand, have no reason to be so constrained.

~~~
unlikelymordant
For an artifact to survive a long time, won't it also undergo a sort of
natural selection? Perhaps the only long surviving ai's are those with the
exact qualities you ascribe to "naturally" occurring entities. I don't think
there is a reason to differentiate intelligences into any natural artificial
dichotomy.

~~~
kobeya
Not under similar selection pressures as we underwent during our evolution,
and unlike natural selection it would not be limited to neighboring
improvements in design space. The range of possible intelligences, and their
drives, would be vastly expanded.

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f_allwein
Interesting - quite likely any anlien civilization would not send living
creatures to explore space. It's more efficient to send von Neumann probes
that can "create factories which will reproduce copies (of) themselves by the
thousands", as argued here: [http://mkaku.org/home/articles/the-physics-of-
extraterrestri...](http://mkaku.org/home/articles/the-physics-of-
extraterrestrial-civilizations/)

~~~
icanhackit
> It's more efficient to send von Neumann probes

A fun mental activity: you could posit that life as we know is a von Neumann
probe, with simple life supporting each more complex level (from the microbes
that made a young Earth's toxic atmosphere oxygen-rich, multicellular machines
etc) until you reach the human who, by being able to engineer their local
environment, shifts intelligence from biology to machines that are able to
coordinate solar-scale engineering, i.e. Dyson swarms, which can power mass-
drivers that send out more von Neumann probes lined with organic terraforming
seeds thus creating a forever repeating process until the universe sinks into
darkness.

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uxcn
I think it's likely intelligent life outside our planet just doesn't, or
won't, have any interest in us outside the infinitesimal possibility of a
threat.

Consider everything less intelligent than us on our planet... If anything
tried to communicate with us, would we even bother trying to figure out what
it was trying to say? Would we try to communicate back?

Suppose an octopus stacked rocks in piles of prime numbers (not including
unity). Would we care beyond possibly putting it on display in an aquarium?

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
Traditionally, no human considers an octopus intelligent unless it can predict
soccer results.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_the_Octopus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_the_Octopus)

Paul aside, we've been ignoring evidence that animals are sentient for
centuries now.

So yes - as a general principle, there's a term missing from the Drake
equation to cover recognisable similarity, technological equivalence, and
mutual interest.

Two civs probably need to be within half a millennium or so of technological
development (human time) to have any possibility of communicating.

Considering how old the universe is, it's quite likely civs pass each other by
all the time, because larger development differentials aren't visible -
literally in one direction, and because of perceived triviality in the other.

Imagine an ant colony in a city, looking for other ant nests, while the city,
all the other cities, and the rest of the civ that built the cities can't be
imagined by the ants. So even though they're in the middle of a busy
civilisation, it's invisible to them.

~~~
trentlott
Ant 1: "Man, how do we get all these strange food deposits without plants?"

Ant 2: "Who knows? That's just the way the universe is."

Man 1: "Man, how do we have all these strange gravity deposits without
matter?"

~~~
orly_bookz
Creepy.

------
watermoose
I would think there is a high chance that if aliens are capable of listening
to us, they would be using AI to do so. After all, within decades of starting
to listen for Aliens, we've already made significant progress in AI
development.

However, once their AI deciphers what we're saying to them, they'll probably
just get annoyed like the FCC and HAM radio operators get annoyed with people
mucking around with radio transmissions before knowing the rules.

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JKCalhoun
One wonders if we ourselves are not a step along the way of a genetic
algorithm that began with a meteor-riding virus crashing on our fertile
primordial world. Sent from?

~~~
yarou
I've considered that possibility as well.

We are the only known species to propagate out of balance within our local
environment. Our brain has this concept of "infinity", which shows up
everywhere in our society. Unconstrained growth is in our DNA.

~~~
Teever
This is not correct. Picture a caterpiller eating all the leaves on a branch
-- the only home it has ever known.

That animal is eating it's environment and we might consider that irrational
and unsustainable -- right up until the moment where it emerges from a cocoon
and flies away to a new world.

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ImTalking
I don't think life can survive itself in order to become super-intelligent.
It's easy to see why we have the Fermi Paradox. Homo Sapiens have been around
for say 100,000 years yet the last 200 years, as we have become technological,
we have basically destroyed our environment. I think any intelligent lifeform
would have a similar path; where the social intelligence lags behind the
technological intelligence. We are not mature enough to handle the global
problems that we are facing today. Solutions to these problems require the
political will on a global, not nationalistic scale and we just are not ready.
Hence we are destroying the environment.

So any intelligent life-form would have to survive this period where they have
the technical intelligence to create damaging things such as cars, coal-fired
power plants, nuclear bombs, etc but lack the maturity and will to manage the
bad issues resulting from that technology.

And I can't see how we will create the solutions on a global scale within such
a divisive world society. It just won't happen. And any life-form would go
thru the same phase. So life will flourish until technology enters the
picture, and then the issues of technology (pollution, over-population,
resource depletion, etc.) will happen very quickly and destructively since any
life-form would be emotionally ill-equipped to handle them. I mean, how can we
construct global solutions when the majority of people still believe in a
'god'. We are still immature apes yet with nuclear bombs.

It would be a rare civilisation that would be able to survive this period. And
hence that's why intelligent life-forms would continually rise and fall, but
never progressing past a certain level of intelligence.

~~~
youeeeeeediot
So whenever I open the newspaper every headline I see in the newspaper points
to the birth pangs of a type one civilization information. However, every time
I open the newspaper I also see the opposite trend as well. What is terrorism?
Terrorism in some sense is a reaction against the creation of a type one
civilization. Now most terrorists cannot articulate this. They don’t even know
what the hell I’m talking about, but what they’re reacting to is not
modernism. What they’re reacting to is the fact that we’re headed toward a
multicultural tolerant scientific society and that is what they don’t want.
They don’t want science. They want a theocracy. They don’t want
multiculturalism. They want monoculturalism. So instinctively they don’t like
the march toward a type one civilization. Now which tendency will win? I don’t
know, but I hope that we emerge as a type one civilization.

—Michio Kaku. "Will Mankind Destroy Itself?", 2010

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale)

~~~
phs318u
> What they’re reacting to is the fact that we’re headed toward a
> multicultural tolerant scientific society and that is what they don’t want.
> They don’t want science. They want a theocracy. They don’t want
> multiculturalism. They want monoculturalism.

Sadly, you've also described an increasing number of western political
conservatives.

[https://m.mic.com/articles/95234/psychologists-discover-
the-...](https://m.mic.com/articles/95234/psychologists-discover-the-striking-
difference-between-conservative-and-liberal-brains#.K34utmriA)

------
sonink
I think emergence of life is a start of a ticking time bomb. If someone would
look at earth from afar and observe the changes on a compressed time scale,
one would see the earth 'lighting' up a bit as soon as intelligent life
emerges.

Life emerging on a planet is like a bomb's fuse getting lit. The bomb in this
case being earth itself with its unique chemical composition. It is only a
question of time when this bomb goes off and destroys all life in the process.
Maybe the purpose of life is to accelerate and magnify that explosion to
achieve the highest possible cosmic reduction of entropy.

Some people argue against this by citing how earth has become relatively
peaceful over the last century. I think this is a false belief - earth is in a
local minima of violence bought about by the emergence of nation states and
nuclear weapons.

The next level of evolution of intelligent life, which will most likely be AI,
will bring with it a new wave of violence. First, when AI takes over and
fights the humans for dominance, and next if there are multiple AI which
emerge and fight over the resources of this solar system.

~~~
p1mrx
> Maybe the purpose of life is to accelerate and magnify that explosion to
> achieve the highest possible cosmic reduction of entropy.

What mechanism would define that purpose? Earth harboring life for a few
billion years, and then snuffing itself out, seems completely irrelevant on
the scale of cosmic entropy.

Your argument might have merit if intelligent life tends to perform crazy
Physics experiments that spawn new universes. Then you'd have an evolutionary
feedback loop where universes become tuned for intelligent life.

~~~
sonink
It is just the direction the universe flows. Life is just a more complex
incendiary reaction born out of a certain chemical chemical composition and
planetary alignment.

In that sense it is perhaps similar to a volcano that erupt. Both are emergent
from the same forces of entropy, but life just takes a non obvious path. Life
seeks to burn itself out, the same way a volcano seeks to cool itself.

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aaron695
I thought it was going to be a much more deep article on how we are going to
'create life' and how we might discover it is amazing and will blow our minds.

(Rather than AI just being our servant)

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partycoder
After aliens or AI see how we treat each other they will probably just
sterilize the entire planet with a gamma ray to not expose themselves to such
apeness.

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transfire
Of course they are. If they exist. There is always the possibility we are the
first intelligent life in this galaxy. Someone has to be first.

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fiatjaf
Nice that the picture has minified frontend code using jQuery, basic string
manipulation and regexes in it.

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tejasv
If these alien beings are built using javascript (as pictured above in the
matrix-esque image) then we definitely have nothing to fear.

This phrase should defeat them: "Hi, welcome to undefined"

~~~
partycoder
If they used JavaScript, the language's excellent floating point arithmetic
would likely make them crash all the time and we will be safe.

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youeeeeeediot
Really doubt any extraterrestrial beings would be willing to make contact with
us in our current state of development. Maybe if we could go a century without
wars or genocide or other atrocities. Honestly unless they want to guide us
(ala Childhood's End) I doubt we have anything to offer.

~~~
ams6110
Unless maybe we taste good?

~~~
youeeeeeediot
They'd probably look at us (for food) the way most people look at food
currently coming out of China. Polluted garbage.

~~~
serf
or perhaps they'd look at us like wild beasts, ripe for cultivation in their
factory farms.

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Balgair
Here is the 'plan' as outlined to me by an old dust hippie outside of Gerlach
(Warning: totally crap, light speed remains the limiter, but entertaining
still the same):

>Humans figure out this brain and AI thing sometime in the next 200 years. So,
now 'you' don't need a body or any of that jazz anymore. Brain uploads, that
whole shebang, fun times ensue, maybe

>Great, now we start ctrl+C and ctrl+V'ing ourselves a lot, we start getting
into the real nitty gritty of physics, chem, bio, math, etc. We get limited by
the amount of computers, matter, and energy we can muster. The Earth turns to
computronium and heat.

>You know how this ends: We deconstruct the Earth and solar system, send the
sun into brown dwarf state and 'colonize' other systems to do the same. The
issue is still light speed. More computation is great, but it is the flops
that matter. This means that other systems are effectively useless and on
their own as it still takes centuries to distribute the computations. You need
more plain-jane matter and energy. Bigger systems are primo then. If we go to
interstellar war, it will be over very large systems. Still, it's unlikely
because...

>Black holes. You fall into one, and time slows down. Boom! You have more
flops for no effort. All you have to do is fall into one and have your 'puters
on the outside do all the work faster. We super-engineer some craziness and
make tiny ones to orbit about. (Note: Now things REALLY fall off into dust
hippie-land).

>Cosmic eggs. The black hole is the egg and we are the sperm (yes, this is
nutto but fun). We all merge our individual black holes and then we make the
'great journey' to the center of galaxy to all merge with all the other AIs
out there. He said it was the only real option. The horizon of the super
massive one in the center is the 'flattest' and therefore easiest to orbit and
'choose your time dilation' (I think he meant that it had the smoothest
gradient as it was the biggest).

>We are then the first to be intelligent. Dust Hippie then said something
that, by this super crazy funland logic, was pretty good. Assuming these time
dilation and systems turned into computronium ideas kinda hold water, then we
know there are no other super-AIs in the galactic core. This is because we can
see many massive suns in very odd orbits about the galactic super black hole.
If they were there, went his thinking, then they would set them in better
orbits with a constant 'power feed' into the AIs orbiting closely to the
black-hole, also they would not be visible to us as they would be enshrouded
themselves by computronium, with no radiation wasted on the way out. Not a bad
extension of crazy logic, I'd say.

Now, these are all predicated on our current physics know-how and that light
speed is as slow as it is. We have great suspicions that this is not true, as
our form of matter is ~5% of the total mass-energy budget of the universe and
it seems most of the universe is not 'positive' energy (the universe is
accelerating in its expansion). Still, its a fun, if likely LSD fueled,
theory.

~~~
dalke
Why should an AI care to spend time near a black hole, in order to 'have more
flops for no effort'? That's the same as slowing down the AI's substrate, or
putting it into suspend mode. If the non-AIs can survive for centuries, why
can't the AIs? In other words, why does the AI care about the "still" in
"still take centuries"?

If the AIs have interstellar war, they won't be bogged down in slowtime around
a black hole. The ones in fasttime have more chances to control the
computronium, and a faster response time to take advantage of whatever those
compute cycles are being use for.

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digi_owl
Paging cstross.

