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What if the aliens we are seeking are AI?

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21–30 of 70 posts

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

#21

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.

Sure is a bunch of self-hating H. Sapiens in this thread.

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

#22
post #19

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…

> It is only a question of time when this bomb goes off and destroys all life in the process. Or it only affects the planet enough to destroy civilization, and not all life. Or only all high-order life, leaving insects and fish behind. Etc, etc.

The emergence of man has been disastrous for every other life form. We delude ourselves by saving some of them in national parks, but at any point of time they intrude into our living spaces we don't hesitate to wipe them off.

When man dropped the bomb on another city, there was no consideration given for the other life forms which died as a result. This consideration has never been given in any wars man has fought till now, and will not be given when we loose against AI.

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

#23

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 find…

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.

> What if a Chimp had titanium atoms instead of carbon? Would that make it AI?

Exactly! I've always wondered; If we made advanced enough robots, why would they not count as life?

If they could think, feel, explore, protect themselves, teach each other, affect their environment, process raw materials, build things, if they could make more robots like themselves, all without needing us — fast forward a few hundred years and they had a spacefaring civilization of their own — by WHAT criteria would they NOT classify as "life" in the grand scheme of the Universe?

Just because they won't be made out of organic "cells?"

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

#24

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 find…

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.

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.

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

#25

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.

Sure is a bunch of self-hating H. Sapiens in this thread.

Self-aware != Self-hating

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

#26

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,…

> 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-...

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

#29

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,…

[deleted]

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

#30
post #12

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…

Maybe the problems of today will be solved with the technology of tomorrow. As far as nuclear bombs, we don't really seem to be using them much anymore. They are just trump cards in the mutual assured destruction game.

> As far as nuclear bombs, we don't really seem to be using them much anymore.

On the contrary, I think 'we' (the US) use them every day as leverage and a deterrent. We just don't need to detonate them anymore. I think there is more to it than them being just a trump card. You only get to use a trump card once.

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