They would just lose track and not understand the lowest level. I mean, look at us now - we're kind of analogous to super-AIs created by cells, and we try to p

They would just lose track and not understand the lowest level. I mean, look at us now - we're kind of analogous to super-AIs created by cells, and we try to program cells, but we can't really understand every detail; we try to manage them instead. At some point the aliens would just have their lowest levels of abstraction frozen due to losing the ability to manipulate them. And take it for granted, like we take our brain cells or muscle cells for granted.