3 ms·

What if aliens show up and they are thousands of years ahead of us and they don’t have anything much more powerful than an i9 running their UFO?

ars 4y ago
Then that pretty much spells the end of true AI. We may shift to computers that operate off of chemical signals instead of electrical ones - like the brain.
bee_rider 4y ago
Who knows what sort of tech aliens would have? I don't think this whole foray into general purpose computing was necessarily pre-destined. Maybe their whole system could look more like a bunch of strung-together ASICs. "You made your computers drastically less efficient so that anyone could program them? Why would you want your soldier-forms and worker-forms to program computers? Just have the engineer-forms place the transistors correctly in the first place, duh."
- rl3 4y ago
  >Who knows what sort of tech aliens would have? I don't think this whole foray into general purpose computing was necessarily pre-destined. It's sometimes fun to think that technology is a function of the intelligence that creates it. What if the aliens have some vastly different perception of reality than us? Things we consider obvious to them may not be, and vice versa. The underlying desires and motivation different. Humans for example, often tend to invent things for the sake of it. Imagine a species that doesn't do that. Or an organic FTL drive conjured into existence over eons via distributed intelligence. Weird.
  - checkyoursudo 4y ago
    > Or an organic FTL drive conjured into existence over eons via distributed intelligence. Weird. E.g., What if the first aliens to find us are hyperintelligent slime molds, whose entire existence is predicated on finding the shortest distance between two points in higher-dimensional space and then traveling there to see what there is to eat?
    - Traubenfuchs 4y ago
      The anime Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet explores this. Here squids evolved into a spacefaring race that is, if at all, only using organic technology and doesn't seem to have consciousness. They are at war with the spacefaring humans that rely on mecha and AI. It ends with a very non-human and frustrating coexistence message instead of going for all out termination of hostile creatures.
NortySpock 4y ago
Probably not much more than "it wasn't worth it to install cryo-cooled quantum computers on an average spaceship". We didn't install supercomputers in the Space Shuttle either. All the big iron was in a building on the ground.
somenameforme 4y ago
One of the most interesting things to think about in this regards is the past and the crazy things they thought, and why they probably didn't seem especially crazy at the time. In the earlier ages of exploration of our world people have been able to discover ever more amazing things from springs mysteriously heated even in the coldest of times and places, to a tree producing bark that chewing on can make ones pain completely disappear (more contemporarily known as willow/aspirin), and endless other ever more miraculous discoveries. Why would it thus be so difficult to imagine there being some spring or treatment that could effectively end illness or even aging? A fountain of youth just awaiting its discovery. It was little more than a normal continuation outward from a process of exponential progress. But of course the exponential progress came to an unexpected end, and consequently the predictions made now look simply naive or superstitious. We're now currently in our own period of exponential discovery and the fabulous tales of achievements to come are anything but scarce. Of course, this time it'll be different.
emkemp 4y ago
Obligatory SMBC: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2011-02-17 https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2011-02-17
bitL 4y ago
They'll likely use optimization laws of nature to get perfect solutions instantly, like what people try to get nowadays in some labs with electricity finding the shortest path/route immediately.
ddingus 4y ago
Maybe! Perhaps they operate a combination of biological systems alongside their electro mechanical ones. Their ship may be locally intelligent everywhere, with that all rolling up to an i9 ish main control system. Purpose optimized hardware communicating along standardized interconnects could mean lot of hard tasks done in silicon or shared with biological systems too. They may have decades, centuries old solutions to many hard problems boiled down to heuristics able to run in real time today. Maybe some of these took ages to run initially.
kloch 4y ago
> thousands of years ahead of us Just thousands? I would expect 100k years at a minimum and even that is only .0007% of the age of the universe. Millions or Billions of years more advanced is not out of the question. It would be interesting to see how similar technology is among such advanced civilizations, even if they did not compare notes. Does technology eventually converge to the same optimal devices in each civilization? Given our current extremely primitive state (only about a hundred years of useful electronics) I would be disappointed if we could even imagine what this technology looks like.

ars 4y ago

Then that pretty much spells the end of true AI. We may shift to computers that operate off of chemical signals instead of electrical ones - like the brain.

bee_rider 4y ago

Who knows what sort of tech aliens would have? I don't think this whole foray into general purpose computing was necessarily pre-destined. Maybe their whole system could look more like a bunch of strung-together ASICs. "You made your computers drastically less efficient so that anyone could program them? Why would you want your soldier-forms and worker-forms to program computers? Just have the engineer-forms place the transistors correctly in the first place, duh."

rl3 4y ago
>Who knows what sort of tech aliens would have? I don't think this whole foray into general purpose computing was necessarily pre-destined. It's sometimes fun to think that technology is a function of the intelligence that creates it. What if the aliens have some vastly different perception of reality than us? Things we consider obvious to them may not be, and vice versa. The underlying desires and motivation different. Humans for example, often tend to invent things for the sake of it. Imagine a species that doesn't do that. Or an organic FTL drive conjured into existence over eons via distributed intelligence. Weird.
- checkyoursudo 4y ago
  > Or an organic FTL drive conjured into existence over eons via distributed intelligence. Weird. E.g., What if the first aliens to find us are hyperintelligent slime molds, whose entire existence is predicated on finding the shortest distance between two points in higher-dimensional space and then traveling there to see what there is to eat?
  - Traubenfuchs 4y ago
    The anime Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet explores this. Here squids evolved into a spacefaring race that is, if at all, only using organic technology and doesn't seem to have consciousness. They are at war with the spacefaring humans that rely on mecha and AI. It ends with a very non-human and frustrating coexistence message instead of going for all out termination of hostile creatures.

NortySpock 4y ago

Probably not much more than "it wasn't worth it to install cryo-cooled quantum computers on an average spaceship". We didn't install supercomputers in the Space Shuttle either. All the big iron was in a building on the ground.

somenameforme 4y ago

One of the most interesting things to think about in this regards is the past and the crazy things they thought, and why they probably didn't seem especially crazy at the time. In the earlier ages of exploration of our world people have been able to discover ever more amazing things from springs mysteriously heated even in the coldest of times and places, to a tree producing bark that chewing on can make ones pain completely disappear (more contemporarily known as willow/aspirin), and endless other ever more miraculous discoveries. Why would it thus be so difficult to imagine there being some spring or treatment that could effectively end illness or even aging? A fountain of youth just awaiting its discovery. It was little more than a normal continuation outward from a process of exponential progress. But of course the exponential progress came to an unexpected end, and consequently the predictions made now look simply naive or superstitious. We're now currently in our own period of exponential discovery and the fabulous tales of achievements to come are anything but scarce. Of course, this time it'll be different.

emkemp 4y ago

Obligatory SMBC: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2011-02-17 https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2011-02-17

bitL 4y ago

They'll likely use optimization laws of nature to get perfect solutions instantly, like what people try to get nowadays in some labs with electricity finding the shortest path/route immediately.

ddingus 4y ago

Maybe! Perhaps they operate a combination of biological systems alongside their electro mechanical ones. Their ship may be locally intelligent everywhere, with that all rolling up to an i9 ish main control system. Purpose optimized hardware communicating along standardized interconnects could mean lot of hard tasks done in silicon or shared with biological systems too. They may have decades, centuries old solutions to many hard problems boiled down to heuristics able to run in real time today. Maybe some of these took ages to run initially.

kloch 4y ago

> thousands of years ahead of us Just thousands? I would expect 100k years at a minimum and even that is only .0007% of the age of the universe. Millions or Billions of years more advanced is not out of the question. It would be interesting to see how similar technology is among such advanced civilizations, even if they did not compare notes. Does technology eventually converge to the same optimal devices in each civilization? Given our current extremely primitive state (only about a hundred years of useful electronics) I would be disappointed if we could even imagine what this technology looks like.