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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?

#51

Post by gauto »

ImTalking wrote: post #16
gauto wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Any technical solutions to the global issues we face will be thwarted by sociological factors due to our immaturity as a species. Climate, for example, requires cooperation on a global level and all populous industrialised countries must participate. China, for example, may decide to not participate for any number of economic or political reasons. What then? They would be further destroying the planet. Should we forc…

Solutions don't necessarily need everybody to be on board.

Somebody could come up with something tomorrow. Maybe a bacteria that can populate the ocean, which precipitates carbon from CO2 in the air, and drops little pellets to the bottom. Probably not a real practical solution, or even a good idea, but it shows how things could rapidly change if the right tech comes along. They wouldn't need to get everyone together - just a petri dish thrown into the ocean.

We are still thinking of solving today's problems with today's technology, which I agree is futile to get everyone on the same page.

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

#52

Post by totalZero »

uxcn wrote: post #34
totalZero wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 understo…

I'm not saying I'd have an emotional attachment to the octopus.

My point is that intelligent life may have discovered something we don't know already, even if it's dumber than us.

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

#53

Post by x1798DE »

uxcn wrote: post #34
totalZero wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 understo…

That seems remarkably incurious. There are like, tens of thousands of species of bee on earth, and there are tons of people who are out there looking into cataloguing them, studying their behavior, etc.

I suspect that if life is common enough that we're boring to most other forms of intelligent life, we'd probably find at least one or two other species that are interested in us, and if it's rare enough that there's only one or two other species out there, then chances are we're interesting enough that some of their folks would want to visit us and find out our deal.

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

#54

Post by tamana »

dalke wrote: post #18
mathattack wrote: post #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 find…

Or, as Terry Bison put it in "They're Made of Meat" - http://www.terrybisson.com/page6/page6.html : > ... "They use the radio waves to talk, but the signals don't come from them. The signals come from machines." > "So who made the machines? That's who we want to contact." > "They made the machines. That's what I'm trying to tell you. Meat made the machines." > "That's ridiculous. How can meat make a machine? You're a…

They're made out of meat.

Don't butcher the title/refrain.

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

#55

Post by p1mrx »

sonink wrote: 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…

> 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.

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

#56

Post by unlikelymordant »

kobeya wrote: post #24
ganeshkrishnan wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 moralit…

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.

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

#57

Post by mark_l_watson »

f_allwein wrote: post #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...

Exactly right! If our species survives and we are able/willing to explore vast areas of space, then it would be done with tiny factory ships. Would we send 'real AIs' on these tiny factory ships, or limited software?

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

#58

Post by kobeya »

unlikelymordant wrote: post #56
kobeya wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 moralit…

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.

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.

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

#59

Post by icanhackit »

f_allwein wrote: post #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...

> 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.

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

#60

Post by 1_listerine_pls »

Razengan wrote: post #23
ganeshkrishnan wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 year…

Think about the reason you can feel something is cold/hot. It's a feeling that is not supposed to exist. Yet, people try to find the particular part or mechanism of the brain causing it, but is a logical circuit really causing such feeling?
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