6 ms·

What if the aliens we are seeking are AI?

56 points by otoolep 10y ago

uxcn 10y ago
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?
- totalZero 10y ago
  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.
  - uxcn 10y ago
    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?
    - totalZero 10y ago
      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.
    - x1798DE 10y ago
      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.
      - uxcn 10y ago
        I personally think life is probably common in the universe. We've only been able to prove exoplanets exist within the last few decades, but the evidence is already that there are a number of planets that are hospitable to life (our kind at least). We've only just started scratching the surface and we've already found things like Tabby's Star [1]. Obviously I think there's a point to us trying to communicate with whatever is out there, I just think we shouldn't be surprised by the lack of response. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KIC_8462852 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KIC_8462852
- TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
  Traditionally, no human considers an octopus intelligent unless it can predict soccer results. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_the_Octopus 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.
  - uxcn 10y ago
    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.
  - trentlott 10y ago
    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?"
    - orly_bookz 10y ago
      Creepy.
- watermoose 10y ago
  > 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.
  - trentlott 10y ago
    It would just be considered a mating ritual, with some reference to the fact that numerical artifacts in uncommunicative life aren't uncommon (sunflower spirals and Fibonacci). Then we'd start studying its anatomy for its prime calculator.
    - CodeMage 10y ago
      > Then we'd start studying its anatomy for its prime calculator. Well, that explains all the stories about people being anally probed during alien abductions.
  - uxcn 10y ago
    This is a really good point. There has been a lot of research into this area lately, as well as animal intelligence in general. My point is still that life less intelligent than us has nothing to communicate to us that we would care to respond to.
f_allwein 10y ago
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-extraterrestrial-civilizations/ http://mkaku.org/home/articles/the-physics-of-extraterrestri...
- mark_l_watson 10y ago
  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?
- icanhackit 10y ago
  > 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.
mathattack 10y ago
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.
- ganeshkrishnan 10y ago
  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.
  - Razengan 10y ago
    > 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?"
    - 1_listerine_pls 10y ago
      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?
youeeeeeediot 10y ago
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.
- ams6110 10y ago
  Unless maybe we taste good?
  - youeeeeeediot 10y ago
    They'd probably look at us (for food) the way most people look at food currently coming out of China. Polluted garbage.
    - serf 10y ago
      or perhaps they'd look at us like wild beasts, ripe for cultivation in their factory farms.
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
  - gauto 10y ago
    If anything it would just be one of their Von Neumann probes looking to fuel up, probably from Jupiter or Uranus. Maybe it would send some pics of us back to the home world where they might say "oh, those guys look neat, add that one to the inhabited planet catalog"
- gauto 10y ago
  Yes, it would be like the ants on the other side of my yard waiting for me to come over and have a conversation with them.
- pavel_lishin 10y ago
tejasv 10y ago
If these alien beings are built using javascript (as pictured above in the matrix-esque image) then we definitely have nothing to fear. This phrase should defeat them: "Hi, welcome to undefined"
- partycoder 10y ago
  If they used JavaScript, the language's excellent floating point arithmetic would likely make them crash all the time and we will be safe.
meeper16 10y ago
AI + Bots
ImTalking 10y ago
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.
- youeeeeeediot 10y ago
  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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale
digi_owl 10y ago
Paging cstross.
sonink 10y ago
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 goes off and destroys all life in the process. Maybe the purpose of life is to accelerate and magnify that explosion to achieve the highest possible cosmic reduction of entropy. Some people argue against this by citing how earth has become relatively peaceful over the last century. I think this is a false belief - earth is in a local minima of violence bought about by the emergence of nation states and nuclear weapons. The next level of evolution of intelligent life, which will most likely be AI, will bring with it a new wave of violence. First, when AI takes over and fights the humans for dominance, and next if there are multiple AI which emerge and fight over the resources of this solar system.
- pavel_lishin 10y ago
  > 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.
  - sonink 10y ago
    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.
    - pavel_lishin 10y ago
      It seems to have worked out pretty well for cats, dogs, rats, and just about every life form that lives in or on us.
JKCalhoun 10y ago
One wonders if we ourselves are not a step along the way of a genetic algorithm that began with a meteor-riding virus crashing on our fertile primordial world. Sent from?
- yarou 10y ago
  I've considered that possibility as well. We are the only known species to propagate out of balance within our local environment. Our brain has this concept of "infinity", which shows up everywhere in our society. Unconstrained growth is in our DNA.
  - Teever 10y ago
    This is not correct. Picture a caterpiller eating all the leaves on a branch -- the only home it has ever known. That animal is eating it's environment and we might consider that irrational and unsustainable -- right up until the moment where it emerges from a cocoon and flies away to a new world.
fiatjaf 10y ago
Nice that the picture has minified frontend code using jQuery, basic string manipulation and regexes in it.
Balgair 10y ago
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.
watermoose 10y ago
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.
aaron695 10y ago
I thought it was going to be a much more deep article on how we are going to 'create life' and how we might discover it is amazing and will blow our minds. (Rather than AI just being our servant)
transfire 10y ago
Of course they are. If they exist. There is always the possibility we are the first intelligent life in this galaxy. Someone has to be first.
partycoder 10y ago
After aliens or AI see how we treat each other they will probably just sterilize the entire planet with a gamma ray to not expose themselves to such apeness.

56 points by otoolep 10y ago

uxcn 10y ago

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?

totalZero 10y ago
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.
- uxcn 10y ago
  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?
  - totalZero 10y ago
    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.
  - x1798DE 10y ago
    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.
    - uxcn 10y ago
      I personally think life is probably common in the universe. We've only been able to prove exoplanets exist within the last few decades, but the evidence is already that there are a number of planets that are hospitable to life (our kind at least). We've only just started scratching the surface and we've already found things like Tabby's Star [1]. Obviously I think there's a point to us trying to communicate with whatever is out there, I just think we shouldn't be surprised by the lack of response. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KIC_8462852 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KIC_8462852
TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
Traditionally, no human considers an octopus intelligent unless it can predict soccer results. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_the_Octopus 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.
- uxcn 10y ago
  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.
- trentlott 10y ago
  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?"
  - orly_bookz 10y ago
    Creepy.
watermoose 10y ago
> 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.
- trentlott 10y ago
  It would just be considered a mating ritual, with some reference to the fact that numerical artifacts in uncommunicative life aren't uncommon (sunflower spirals and Fibonacci). Then we'd start studying its anatomy for its prime calculator.
  - CodeMage 10y ago
    > Then we'd start studying its anatomy for its prime calculator. Well, that explains all the stories about people being anally probed during alien abductions.
- uxcn 10y ago
  This is a really good point. There has been a lot of research into this area lately, as well as animal intelligence in general. My point is still that life less intelligent than us has nothing to communicate to us that we would care to respond to.

f_allwein 10y ago

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-extraterrestrial-civilizations/ http://mkaku.org/home/articles/the-physics-of-extraterrestri...

mark_l_watson 10y ago
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?
icanhackit 10y ago
> 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.

mathattack 10y ago

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.

ganeshkrishnan 10y ago
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.
- Razengan 10y ago
  > 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?"
  - 1_listerine_pls 10y ago
    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?

youeeeeeediot 10y ago

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.

ams6110 10y ago
Unless maybe we taste good?
- youeeeeeediot 10y ago
  They'd probably look at us (for food) the way most people look at food currently coming out of China. Polluted garbage.
  - serf 10y ago
    or perhaps they'd look at us like wild beasts, ripe for cultivation in their factory farms.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
- gauto 10y ago
  If anything it would just be one of their Von Neumann probes looking to fuel up, probably from Jupiter or Uranus. Maybe it would send some pics of us back to the home world where they might say "oh, those guys look neat, add that one to the inhabited planet catalog"
gauto 10y ago
Yes, it would be like the ants on the other side of my yard waiting for me to come over and have a conversation with them.
pavel_lishin 10y ago

tejasv 10y ago

If these alien beings are built using javascript (as pictured above in the matrix-esque image) then we definitely have nothing to fear. This phrase should defeat them: "Hi, welcome to undefined"

partycoder 10y ago
If they used JavaScript, the language's excellent floating point arithmetic would likely make them crash all the time and we will be safe.

meeper16 10y ago

AI + Bots

ImTalking 10y ago

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.

youeeeeeediot 10y ago
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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale

digi_owl 10y ago

Paging cstross.

sonink 10y ago

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 goes off and destroys all life in the process. Maybe the purpose of life is to accelerate and magnify that explosion to achieve the highest possible cosmic reduction of entropy. Some people argue against this by citing how earth has become relatively peaceful over the last century. I think this is a false belief - earth is in a local minima of violence bought about by the emergence of nation states and nuclear weapons. The next level of evolution of intelligent life, which will most likely be AI, will bring with it a new wave of violence. First, when AI takes over and fights the humans for dominance, and next if there are multiple AI which emerge and fight over the resources of this solar system.

pavel_lishin 10y ago
> 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.
- sonink 10y ago
  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.
  - pavel_lishin 10y ago
    It seems to have worked out pretty well for cats, dogs, rats, and just about every life form that lives in or on us.

JKCalhoun 10y ago

One wonders if we ourselves are not a step along the way of a genetic algorithm that began with a meteor-riding virus crashing on our fertile primordial world. Sent from?

yarou 10y ago
I've considered that possibility as well. We are the only known species to propagate out of balance within our local environment. Our brain has this concept of "infinity", which shows up everywhere in our society. Unconstrained growth is in our DNA.
- Teever 10y ago
  This is not correct. Picture a caterpiller eating all the leaves on a branch -- the only home it has ever known. That animal is eating it's environment and we might consider that irrational and unsustainable -- right up until the moment where it emerges from a cocoon and flies away to a new world.

fiatjaf 10y ago

Nice that the picture has minified frontend code using jQuery, basic string manipulation and regexes in it.

Balgair 10y ago

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.

watermoose 10y ago

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.

aaron695 10y ago

I thought it was going to be a much more deep article on how we are going to 'create life' and how we might discover it is amazing and will blow our minds. (Rather than AI just being our servant)

transfire 10y ago

Of course they are. If they exist. There is always the possibility we are the first intelligent life in this galaxy. Someone has to be first.

partycoder 10y ago

After aliens or AI see how we treat each other they will probably just sterilize the entire planet with a gamma ray to not expose themselves to such apeness.