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What if the aliens we are seeking are AI?

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Re: What if the aliens we are seeking are AI?

#2
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...

Re: What if the aliens we are seeking are AI?

#3
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.

Re: What if the aliens we are seeking are AI?

#4
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.

Re: What if the aliens we are seeking are AI?

#5

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.

Unless maybe we taste good?

Re: What if the aliens we are seeking are AI?

#8
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.

Re: What if the aliens we are seeking are AI?

#9

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 n…

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

Re: What if the aliens we are seeking are AI?

#10
post #5

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.

Unless maybe we taste good?

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