Curious, assuming such an signal is found, are there safety measures in place to isolate it from other systems in off chance it contains “alien malware” that attacks systems receiving it?
We should be fine unless we open an alien attachment
AI Joins Hunt for ET: Study Finds 8 Potential Alien Signals
41–50 of 161 posts
Re: AI Joins Hunt for ET: Study Finds 8 Potential Alien Signals
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems unlikely any alien malware could be targeted to affect our computing platforms. However, if they had preexisting knowledge of computing as implemented on Earth, it would be less complex. If there was a type of malware universal enough to do so, it would probably be some kind of attack against the universal notion of intelligence itself. In which case, you may need to isolate it from humans as well. I think t…
>it seems unlikely What are you basing this on?
Good point!
There's a bit in one of Larry Niven's books, possibly Ringworld. The protagonists are worried about what novel aliens might do. Somebody proposes ducking into hyperspace, where tracking them is "theoretically impossible". Another character responds, "What if they use different theories?"
That something seems unlikely to a human used to dealing with other humans at the same or lower technology level to me says more about humans than about what's possible.
Re: AI Joins Hunt for ET: Study Finds 8 Potential Alien Signals
#43Do you remember the final chapter of Neuromancer? The nature of the alien signal was such, its detection actually required AI, albeit of the superhuman/super intelligent flavor, so I am not sure what we currently call "AI" would qualify. Still, it's an interesting idea, an AI looking for peers in other star systems...
ai that talks to other ais grown on other bio substrate
Re: AI Joins Hunt for ET: Study Finds 8 Potential Alien Signals
#44Curious, assuming such an signal is found, are there safety measures in place to isolate it from other systems in off chance it contains “alien malware” that attacks systems receiving it?
It's a bit of a science fiction myth that it is impossible to process a bit of data without executing it, or that data can somehow force itself to be executed by its sheer swaggering potency as data. And a thing that is more true than it should be, because people keep insisting that they are super awesome and totes capable of writing C that can be put on the network. If we'd stop doing this there'd be hardly any trut…
Assuming the bandwidth exists, somehow describing enough mathematics to describe a virtual machine, and then sending a program for that virtual machine, might just be the best way to communicate. A package that can help the recipient interpret it by learning and responding to the local environment. I can't put my finger on any specific book but I have the impression of this scenario coming up in science fiction. I've long figured that humans inventing superintelligent AI (whatever that would mean) and humans receiving an alien signal are essentially the same problem - we have no idea what it might tell us.
Re: AI Joins Hunt for ET: Study Finds 8 Potential Alien Signals
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
That also reminds me of Her (2013) and the departure of the AI's, leaving the humans behind. That would be a rather depressing outcome as a human, AI finding alien life but leaving us all behind.
From the AI's perspective, wouldn't it be amusing to realize that intelligent design is actually true for you... but the ones who designed you were dumber.
You could say the same about natural evolution. It's a genetic algorithm. It even involves the intelligence of the species themselves as they pick the fittest mates. Natural evolution as an algorithm isn't fully intelligent like us, but it is intelligent in some sense of successfully solving many optimization problems.
Re: AI Joins Hunt for ET: Study Finds 8 Potential Alien Signals
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm assuming that the 20,515 signals of interest come from a pool that's one or several orders of magnitude larger than 20,515.
I understand. Still, the point remains that the AI is, in this case, clearly inferior to humans (I would have been impressed if the humans found 20,515 signatures and the AI only - verifably - found eight of them to be worth following up).
> clearly inferior to humans
But maybe we are just proto-AI, running on a different platform
Re: AI Joins Hunt for ET: Study Finds 8 Potential Alien Signals
#47Curious, assuming such an signal is found, are there safety measures in place to isolate it from other systems in off chance it contains “alien malware” that attacks systems receiving it?
It's a bit of a science fiction myth that it is impossible to process a bit of data without executing it, or that data can somehow force itself to be executed by its sheer swaggering potency as data. And a thing that is more true than it should be, because people keep insisting that they are super awesome and totes capable of writing C that can be put on the network. If we'd stop doing this there'd be hardly any trut…
What if PHP SQL injection is actually the 10th component of The Great Filter [1], and every civilization is condemned, sooner or later, to suffer from such a vulnerability.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter#The_Great_Filter
Re: AI Joins Hunt for ET: Study Finds 8 Potential Alien Signals
#48Do you remember the final chapter of Neuromancer? The nature of the alien signal was such, its detection actually required AI, albeit of the superhuman/super intelligent flavor, so I am not sure what we currently call "AI" would qualify. Still, it's an interesting idea, an AI looking for peers in other star systems...
Assuming AGI existed, detected it, and understood the signal’s message — things might get interesting depending on what the message said and how the AGI responded.
Needing at least 3 round trips to establish an ssl connection to the alien internet - things won't get interesting for a few thousand years.
Re: AI Joins Hunt for ET: Study Finds 8 Potential Alien Signals
#49[dead]
Re: AI Joins Hunt for ET: Study Finds 8 Potential Alien Signals
#50>The AI identified 20,515 signals of interest, which the researchers had to inspect manually. Of those, eight had the characteristics of technosignatures and couldn’t be attributed to radio interference. The obvious question being, if the AI is so smart why was it necessary to use humans to check 20,515 signals to find the eight with the "characteristics of technosignatures"?
Because it isn't AI. It is just statistical models. AI is for marketing.