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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?

#31

Post by 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?

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

#32

Post by totalZero »

uxcn wrote: post #31

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…

Yeah, I'd care about that octopus. I would want to study it and see what else it does.

Prime numbers are a consequential concept. Maybe that octopus knows about another consequential concept that we haven't been thinking about for many hundreds of years.

Also, maybe the smartest thing to do if an unknown entity tries to contact you, is to play dumb.

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

#34

Post by uxcn »

totalZero wrote: post #32
uxcn wrote: post #31

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…

Yeah, I'd care about that octopus. I would want to study it and see what else it does. Prime numbers are a consequential concept. Maybe that octopus knows about another consequential concept that we haven't been thinking about for many hundreds of years. Also, maybe the smartest thing to do if an unknown entity tries to contact you, is to play dumb.

Yeah, I'd care about that octopus. I would want to study it and see what else it does.

Sure, I mean intelligent life is interesting to us because it's novel. If there is other intelligent life in the galaxy (universe), it probably implies that intelligent life is relatively common. So, more (less) intelligent life would be extremely inconsequential to them. Why waste resources studying something already well understood?

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

#35

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

uxcn wrote: post #31

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…

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

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.

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

#36

Post by uxcn »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #35
uxcn wrote: post #31

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…

Traditionally, no human considers an octopus intelligent unless it can predict soccer results. 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 w…

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

Intelligence seems to expand polynomially or exponentially by a lot of measures though (e.g. technology). The closest analogy for us compared to another civilization that could actually receive our radio communication I think would be chimpanzees using sticks to eat termites.

If I had to guess, I'd guess there's probably some kind of technological asymptote, but considering the scale of the universe (more importantly its complexity) I think we are probably nowhere near it.

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

#37

Post by watermoose »

uxcn wrote: post #31

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…

> 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?

Considering that a lot of research is done on animal communication, I think that's a poor example.

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

#38

Post by trentlott »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #35
uxcn wrote: post #31

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…

Traditionally, no human considers an octopus intelligent unless it can predict soccer results. 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 w…

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?"

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

#39

Post by 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.

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

#40

Post by 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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