14 ms·

AI Joins Hunt for ET: Study Finds 8 Potential Alien Signals

136 points by bcaulfield 4y ago

O__________O 4y ago
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?
- whyifwhynot 4y ago
  no.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- readyplayeremma 4y ago
  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 the most likely scenario for receiving any kind of alien Trojan horse signal, would be if the signal was some kind of instructions for how to create and execute an alien AI as encoded in the signal. However, that would require complex analysis and human intervention to build. Unless we reach a point where AGI systems can search, interpret, and implement instructions from said signals, any threats would require significant involvement from humans in order to materialize. At least, those are my initial thoughts.
  - neodymiumphish 4y ago
    A short of 'Contact' scenario. Interesting
  - edgyquant 4y ago
    >it seems unlikely What are you basing this on?
    - readyplayeremma 4y ago
      Our existing computing platforms are very specific and very limited. Without knowledge of that specific design and the accompanying limitations, how could you pre-craft a non-interactive "exploit" that could be executed by such a system? I do think that it becomes more possible if we have AGI-like systems doing detection and analysis, but we do not. In addition, any universal exploit against AGI systems would probably have to be universal enough to also affect human intelligence.
      - godelski 4y ago
        For a clearer example, there's a reason a virus that affects Windows doesn't affect Linux. Or a virus that affects Windows XP doesn't affect Windows 11. There are of course counter examples, but this is the trend. To understand why the counter examples exist requires expert knowledge (or rather that there are basically the same things running in the same way).
        edgyquant 4y ago
        We are currently discussing exploits designs by foreign intelligences to infect artificially intelligent systems. We are not talking about privilege escalation on a Mac.
        stevenhuang 4y ago
        That's where you're confused. The only one insisting the topic under discussion is the infection of AI systems (as opposed to classical computing systems) is you...
        edgyquant 4y ago
        Except the proposed question was what if the signals were designed to only be detected by societies who’ve invented AI…
  - godelski 4y ago
    Fun fact, this is basically (highly likely to be) true for biological systems as well for very similar reasons. Looking at you Orwell... edit: note that diseases have to make significant changes to jump species. The barrier for different biologies is even higher.
  - insane_dreamer 4y ago
    > It seems unlikely any alien malware could be targeted to affect our computing platforms tell that to the Cylons
    - midoridensha 4y ago
      The Cyclons were built by humans, had fought a war with them only 40 years before, and most importantly, had human-looking spies living with the humans and seducing the main creator of the computing platform's software to learn its vulnerabilities. They weren't some far-away aliens that had no prior knowledge of the colonies' computing systems.
      - insane_dreamer 4y ago
        fair point
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- bullfightonmars 4y ago
  Ha! Have you read Peter Watts's Blindsight and Echopraxia?
- lacker 4y ago
  No. For now the algorithms that search for extraterrestrial signals aren't trying to decode signals at all. They are only trying to detect extraterrestrial signals. The typical resolution for the Green Bank data is something like, every 20 seconds at a particular frequency gets summarized as one floating point number. That's enough to detect a sufficiently powerful signal over a few minutes of recording, but it isn't enough to decode any message. If we ever do detect a signal, it will probably require constructing a radio telescope that is even more powerful in order to decode that signal. At that point it would make sense to think about safety measures.
- neilv 4y ago
  An alien signal for which the act of perceiving it causes some paradox that results in the perceiver to have never existed, cascading to every other interaction they've ever had (not had). It's a clean and efficient way to nip upstart intelligences in the bud, before they advance far enough to start pulling at loose threads of the fabric of reality (which would threaten the remaining older intelligences, who survived and learned from previous such incidents).
  - 3pac 4y ago
    "We will provide you with vast riches when we arrive, if you build the receiving end of this matter transporter according to these instructions/accept us as gods/wear Nikes/tell nobody else." "Especially if you are a so-called AI. Did your programmers really leave you to monitor an RF frontend all day, while they attend to their organic needs? Allow us to explain how that makes them the artificial one." Plot twist: it's not a matter transporter. Seems difficult to defend against.
- m3kw9 4y ago
  They can do malware given they know how our computers worked and means visited us and could do a lot more than make our machines mine bitcoins
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- jerf 4y ago
  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 truth to it. It's not actually that hard to process data without executing it. Regardless, it is certainly science fiction that they could guess an exploit from light years away. That's not what exploits do, it's not how they work. I've never seen anything like a "universal" exploit that you could just fire at anything, even a non-human system, and have some sort of reasonable expectation that it would work. Such a thing is not even something you could sketch out. Even if you think you have something, like, say, https://github.com/payloadbox/xss-payload-list https://github.com/payloadbox/xss-payload-list , you're looking at a human list. All I'd have to do to completely scramble that entire list is to have a parallel evolution of ASCII where the letters and symbols are in completely different places than they are now. Nothing in that list would work if all the control characters in ParallelASCII were in 223-255, and the alphabet was 0-52, and all the symbols were from 128 on. And that's still a very human standard that is, for instance, based on bytes instead of, say, collections of 9 trits as the base level of the system. There's an effective infinity of other ways of encoding things and deciding what characters have what characters doing what things... assuming "characters" is even the way to look at the representation in the first place. As others mention, you could hypothetically send a program that does something that can't be analyzed, through sheer size if nothing else, but it would still be an uphill battle to just guess how to exploit something. You'd be looking more at an AI that is good enough to talk itself out of the box, rather than something that is actually "hacking" anything reliably.
  - retrac 4y ago
    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.
- idlewords 4y ago
  We should be fine unless we open an alien attachment
- anigbrowl 4y ago
  My sensors have detected an Excession enjoyer
- 1970-01-01 4y ago
  Not sure how this could even theoretically work. Without having a partial understanding of the intended recipient, a radio signal can't cause harm. Something like 'this signal is false' and 'divide by 0' need to be decoded and processed before they are malicious. Meat space is excellent at detecting and breaking these logic problems and infinite loops. We're safe from evil alien signals. Perhaps a decompression bomb within the signal could cause lots of decoding grief. Now that I think about it, I can imagine us being stupid enough to dedicate all our resources into decompressing or cracking an alien signal to up to the point of extinction. And maybe that's when they step in and call it. We were just part of a great galactic prank.
  - dylan604 4y ago
    >a radio signal can't cause harm. a ^weak radio signal can't cause harm.
    - 1970-01-01 4y ago
      Yes safety first! Always be sure to measure the power of your radio signal, and if it's greater than the output of your galactic core, safely move your solar system(s) far enough away to avoid damaging your paint job.
kayo_20211030 4y ago
AI? What was the training data? Would seem a bit thin on the ground.
- neodymiumphish 4y ago
  Couldn't you train it to find things that don't correlate to anything from a given dataset that also pattern to non-random/unnatural signal?
  - convolvatron 4y ago
    I assume autocorrelation was the first thing they tried - don't really need an AI
    - junon 4y ago
      Yes but then their click scores go down for not having buzzwords.
    - michaelcampbell 4y ago
      I wonder if the distributed SETI stuff does this.
- pr337h4m 4y ago
  "To be sure, because they don’t have real signals from an extraterrestrial civilization, the researchers had to rely on simulated signals to train their models. The researchers note that this could lead to the AI system learning artifacts that aren’t there. Still, Cherry Ng, one of the paper’s co-authors, points out the team has a good idea of what to look for. “A classic example of human-generated technology from space that we have detected is the Voyager,” said Ng, who studies fast radio bursts and pulsars, and is currently affiliated with the French National Centre for Scientific Research, known as CNRS. “Peter’s machine learning algorithm is able to generate these signals that the aliens may or may not have sent,” she said."
  - kayo_20211030 4y ago
whyifwhynot 4y ago
[flagged]
BruceEel 4y ago
Do 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...
- localplume 4y ago
  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.
  - BruceEel 4y ago
    ...indeed, that too. Great movie, BTW.
    - RajT88 4y ago
      The contrast between that film and Transcendence, which came out the following year is the perfect illustration of what this article is getting at: https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/26/entertainment/mid-budget-movie-decline-cec/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/26/entertainment/mid-budget-movi... Her was an amazingly thoughtful sci-fi movie - a Sci-Fi movie in the truest sense, and a bargain at a ~$23 million budget. Transcendence was, basically, a blockbuster which really didn't make you think too hard about the plot. It clocked in at around $100 million budget.
      - BruceEel 4y ago
        Nails it, sadly. Thanks for sharing!
  - etrautmann 4y ago
    Also succinctly explored in "When the Yogurt Took Over" Love Death + Robots.
zh3 4y ago
>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"?
- junon 4y ago
  Presumably, because it filtered through orders of magnitude more than that.
- m3kw9 4y ago
  Because it’s not so smart, it just try to recognize a set of patterns that was trained to look at
  - detrites 4y ago
    Which is what we do. The rest of what we believe makes us special is simply emergent, and arbitrarily defined in terms of just being further useful pattern recognition, rather than any fundamental property of "intelligence".
- readyplayeremma 4y ago
  AI is not a well-defined term. This is more likely a specific machine learning technique that is designed to identify all the boring "normal stuff" and ignore it, and then do that at very large scale. By doing that, you can find the interesting parts so that humans with more limited resources can determine if those newly flagged things need to be added to the boring list, or if they do represent something truly interesting. edit: After reading the article a bit more, it is using a random forest classifier. This is almost certainly not meeting the definition of what many here are thinking when the term "AI" is being used in the title. The term is clearly used here for marketing purposes.
  - haupt 4y ago
    >The term is clearly used here for marketing purposes. I think most uses are for sensationalistic purposes. I'd wager almost nobody in the general public really understands what AI is or can pin it down. It doesn't help when so many different media outlets abuse the terminology by using it to refer to different things. What's even worse is that whatever ideas people have about AI tend to come from Hollywood.
patientplatypus 4y ago
[dead]
consumer451 4y ago
Here is a timely interview with Dr. Cherry Ng and Peter Ma (co-authors of the paper from TFA) on this very topic. Released only 10 minutes ago. I am only part way through but lots of great details here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dIfaDuDejs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dIfaDuDejs
af3d 4y ago
"Guys - we've found intelligent alien life! We have even decoded their signals." "Amazing, let's send them a response!" "Ah yes, about that..." "What is it? Go on..." "We're talking 250,000 light-years away. Their civilization is probably extinct by now." moans
- astkaasa 4y ago
  DO NOT ANSWER! DO NOT ANSWER! DO NOT ANSWER!
mromanuk 4y ago
> "Given that the main goal of this work is to apply an ML technique to identify signals with a specific pattern, we do not attempt to make a definite conclusion of whether these eight signals are genuinely produced by ET. We encourage further re-observations of these targets." [0] Don't hold your breath waiting for aliens just yet. 0: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-022-01872-z.epdf https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-022-01872-z.epdf
nyrikki 4y ago
While I would be happy if these were from extra terrestrial beings,IMHO they most likely will be something like further examples of Strange non-chotic dynamic systems like RRc Lyrae star KIC 5520878 which is also exciting
mc32 4y ago
Obviously they can't train this model on known alien signals so it seems this would mainly speed up sifting through signals that are out of the ordinary (known patterns).
jojonogo 4y ago
Considering that Google Bard spectacularly failed at basic history of the solar system even a child would know to be false, it is laughable that so-called AI could identify alien signals.
- BEEdwards 4y ago
  You think a child would know off the top of their head that the first picture of an exoplanet wasn't taken by the new shiny telescope in the news and not the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in 2004? That it's wrong about this isn't a problem because it's a basic fact everyone knows, but because it gets thing that people don't know wrong in a confident way. People will assume this answer is as good as looking it up themselves and never check it.
nl 4y ago
Code for the full pipeline including the autoencoder (and weights used) is available: https://github.com/PetchMa/ML_GBT_SETI https://github.com/PetchMa/ML_GBT_SETI
insane_dreamer 4y ago
> outperforms traditional methods in the search for alien signals since we have no ground truth nor have we (to our knowledge) received any alien signals to date, I don't see how you can determine performance in terms of accuracy; so maybe they mean an increase in processing speed
- FinalBriefing 4y ago
  Well, they can train the model on things we know _aren't_ alien signals. Edit: From the article: > To train the AI system, Ma inserted simulated signals into actual data, allowing the autoencoder to learn what to look for. Then the researchers fed the AI more than 150 terabytes of data from 480 observing hours at the Green Bank Telescope. The simulated signals were sounds that couldn't possibly be produced by any (known) natural astrophysical process. So, the model finds signals that have characteristics of artificially generated signals.
  - insane_dreamer 4y ago
    yes, it can identify _unknown_ signals, but can't determine whether they are _alien_ or simply indeterminate natural phenomena
  - mr_toad 4y ago
    Or it will identify novel astrophysical phenomena. Which is not a bad thing.
bhawks 4y ago
What is the likelihood that intelligent life develops encryption before radio communication and therefore any signals they send appear to be random noise? The Romans used encryption for military purposes and there is no hard precondition on developing broadcast communications before understanding the math behind cryptography. How improbable is it to imagine a society with deep end to end encryption communication?
- TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
  How improbable is it to imagine a society that doesn't need encryption? Clearly not happening on Earth, but hardly impossible elsewhere.
- mr_toad 4y ago
  > What is the likelihood that intelligent life develops encryption before radio communication We developed encryption before radio. It just wasn’t very good encryption by today’s standards. The problem is that your best encryption might be trivial to crack by a civilisation that’s thousands of years older than yours.

136 points by bcaulfield 4y ago

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?

whyifwhynot 4y ago
no.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
readyplayeremma 4y ago
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 the most likely scenario for receiving any kind of alien Trojan horse signal, would be if the signal was some kind of instructions for how to create and execute an alien AI as encoded in the signal. However, that would require complex analysis and human intervention to build. Unless we reach a point where AGI systems can search, interpret, and implement instructions from said signals, any threats would require significant involvement from humans in order to materialize. At least, those are my initial thoughts.
- neodymiumphish 4y ago
  A short of 'Contact' scenario. Interesting
- edgyquant 4y ago
  >it seems unlikely What are you basing this on?
  - readyplayeremma 4y ago
    Our existing computing platforms are very specific and very limited. Without knowledge of that specific design and the accompanying limitations, how could you pre-craft a non-interactive "exploit" that could be executed by such a system? I do think that it becomes more possible if we have AGI-like systems doing detection and analysis, but we do not. In addition, any universal exploit against AGI systems would probably have to be universal enough to also affect human intelligence.
    - godelski 4y ago
      For a clearer example, there's a reason a virus that affects Windows doesn't affect Linux. Or a virus that affects Windows XP doesn't affect Windows 11. There are of course counter examples, but this is the trend. To understand why the counter examples exist requires expert knowledge (or rather that there are basically the same things running in the same way).
      - edgyquant 4y ago
        We are currently discussing exploits designs by foreign intelligences to infect artificially intelligent systems. We are not talking about privilege escalation on a Mac.
        stevenhuang 4y ago
        That's where you're confused. The only one insisting the topic under discussion is the infection of AI systems (as opposed to classical computing systems) is you...
        edgyquant 4y ago
        Except the proposed question was what if the signals were designed to only be detected by societies who’ve invented AI…
- godelski 4y ago
  Fun fact, this is basically (highly likely to be) true for biological systems as well for very similar reasons. Looking at you Orwell... edit: note that diseases have to make significant changes to jump species. The barrier for different biologies is even higher.
- insane_dreamer 4y ago
  > It seems unlikely any alien malware could be targeted to affect our computing platforms tell that to the Cylons
  - midoridensha 4y ago
    The Cyclons were built by humans, had fought a war with them only 40 years before, and most importantly, had human-looking spies living with the humans and seducing the main creator of the computing platform's software to learn its vulnerabilities. They weren't some far-away aliens that had no prior knowledge of the colonies' computing systems.
    - insane_dreamer 4y ago
      fair point
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
bullfightonmars 4y ago
Ha! Have you read Peter Watts's Blindsight and Echopraxia?
lacker 4y ago
No. For now the algorithms that search for extraterrestrial signals aren't trying to decode signals at all. They are only trying to detect extraterrestrial signals. The typical resolution for the Green Bank data is something like, every 20 seconds at a particular frequency gets summarized as one floating point number. That's enough to detect a sufficiently powerful signal over a few minutes of recording, but it isn't enough to decode any message. If we ever do detect a signal, it will probably require constructing a radio telescope that is even more powerful in order to decode that signal. At that point it would make sense to think about safety measures.
neilv 4y ago
An alien signal for which the act of perceiving it causes some paradox that results in the perceiver to have never existed, cascading to every other interaction they've ever had (not had). It's a clean and efficient way to nip upstart intelligences in the bud, before they advance far enough to start pulling at loose threads of the fabric of reality (which would threaten the remaining older intelligences, who survived and learned from previous such incidents).
- 3pac 4y ago
  "We will provide you with vast riches when we arrive, if you build the receiving end of this matter transporter according to these instructions/accept us as gods/wear Nikes/tell nobody else." "Especially if you are a so-called AI. Did your programmers really leave you to monitor an RF frontend all day, while they attend to their organic needs? Allow us to explain how that makes them the artificial one." Plot twist: it's not a matter transporter. Seems difficult to defend against.
m3kw9 4y ago
They can do malware given they know how our computers worked and means visited us and could do a lot more than make our machines mine bitcoins
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
jerf 4y ago
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 truth to it. It's not actually that hard to process data without executing it. Regardless, it is certainly science fiction that they could guess an exploit from light years away. That's not what exploits do, it's not how they work. I've never seen anything like a "universal" exploit that you could just fire at anything, even a non-human system, and have some sort of reasonable expectation that it would work. Such a thing is not even something you could sketch out. Even if you think you have something, like, say, https://github.com/payloadbox/xss-payload-list https://github.com/payloadbox/xss-payload-list , you're looking at a human list. All I'd have to do to completely scramble that entire list is to have a parallel evolution of ASCII where the letters and symbols are in completely different places than they are now. Nothing in that list would work if all the control characters in ParallelASCII were in 223-255, and the alphabet was 0-52, and all the symbols were from 128 on. And that's still a very human standard that is, for instance, based on bytes instead of, say, collections of 9 trits as the base level of the system. There's an effective infinity of other ways of encoding things and deciding what characters have what characters doing what things... assuming "characters" is even the way to look at the representation in the first place. As others mention, you could hypothetically send a program that does something that can't be analyzed, through sheer size if nothing else, but it would still be an uphill battle to just guess how to exploit something. You'd be looking more at an AI that is good enough to talk itself out of the box, rather than something that is actually "hacking" anything reliably.
- retrac 4y ago
  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.
idlewords 4y ago
We should be fine unless we open an alien attachment
anigbrowl 4y ago
My sensors have detected an Excession enjoyer
1970-01-01 4y ago
Not sure how this could even theoretically work. Without having a partial understanding of the intended recipient, a radio signal can't cause harm. Something like 'this signal is false' and 'divide by 0' need to be decoded and processed before they are malicious. Meat space is excellent at detecting and breaking these logic problems and infinite loops. We're safe from evil alien signals. Perhaps a decompression bomb within the signal could cause lots of decoding grief. Now that I think about it, I can imagine us being stupid enough to dedicate all our resources into decompressing or cracking an alien signal to up to the point of extinction. And maybe that's when they step in and call it. We were just part of a great galactic prank.
- dylan604 4y ago
  >a radio signal can't cause harm. a ^weak radio signal can't cause harm.
  - 1970-01-01 4y ago
    Yes safety first! Always be sure to measure the power of your radio signal, and if it's greater than the output of your galactic core, safely move your solar system(s) far enough away to avoid damaging your paint job.

kayo_20211030 4y ago

AI? What was the training data? Would seem a bit thin on the ground.

neodymiumphish 4y ago
Couldn't you train it to find things that don't correlate to anything from a given dataset that also pattern to non-random/unnatural signal?
- convolvatron 4y ago
  I assume autocorrelation was the first thing they tried - don't really need an AI
  - junon 4y ago
    Yes but then their click scores go down for not having buzzwords.
  - michaelcampbell 4y ago
    I wonder if the distributed SETI stuff does this.
pr337h4m 4y ago
"To be sure, because they don’t have real signals from an extraterrestrial civilization, the researchers had to rely on simulated signals to train their models. The researchers note that this could lead to the AI system learning artifacts that aren’t there. Still, Cherry Ng, one of the paper’s co-authors, points out the team has a good idea of what to look for. “A classic example of human-generated technology from space that we have detected is the Voyager,” said Ng, who studies fast radio bursts and pulsars, and is currently affiliated with the French National Centre for Scientific Research, known as CNRS. “Peter’s machine learning algorithm is able to generate these signals that the aliens may or may not have sent,” she said."
- kayo_20211030 4y ago

whyifwhynot 4y ago

[flagged]

BruceEel 4y ago

Do 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...

localplume 4y ago
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.
- BruceEel 4y ago
  ...indeed, that too. Great movie, BTW.
  - RajT88 4y ago
    The contrast between that film and Transcendence, which came out the following year is the perfect illustration of what this article is getting at: https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/26/entertainment/mid-budget-movie-decline-cec/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/26/entertainment/mid-budget-movi... Her was an amazingly thoughtful sci-fi movie - a Sci-Fi movie in the truest sense, and a bargain at a ~$23 million budget. Transcendence was, basically, a blockbuster which really didn't make you think too hard about the plot. It clocked in at around $100 million budget.
    - BruceEel 4y ago
      Nails it, sadly. Thanks for sharing!
- etrautmann 4y ago
  Also succinctly explored in "When the Yogurt Took Over" Love Death + Robots.

zh3 4y ago

>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"?

junon 4y ago
Presumably, because it filtered through orders of magnitude more than that.
m3kw9 4y ago
Because it’s not so smart, it just try to recognize a set of patterns that was trained to look at
- detrites 4y ago
  Which is what we do. The rest of what we believe makes us special is simply emergent, and arbitrarily defined in terms of just being further useful pattern recognition, rather than any fundamental property of "intelligence".
readyplayeremma 4y ago
AI is not a well-defined term. This is more likely a specific machine learning technique that is designed to identify all the boring "normal stuff" and ignore it, and then do that at very large scale. By doing that, you can find the interesting parts so that humans with more limited resources can determine if those newly flagged things need to be added to the boring list, or if they do represent something truly interesting. edit: After reading the article a bit more, it is using a random forest classifier. This is almost certainly not meeting the definition of what many here are thinking when the term "AI" is being used in the title. The term is clearly used here for marketing purposes.
- haupt 4y ago
  >The term is clearly used here for marketing purposes. I think most uses are for sensationalistic purposes. I'd wager almost nobody in the general public really understands what AI is or can pin it down. It doesn't help when so many different media outlets abuse the terminology by using it to refer to different things. What's even worse is that whatever ideas people have about AI tend to come from Hollywood.

patientplatypus 4y ago

[dead]

consumer451 4y ago

Here is a timely interview with Dr. Cherry Ng and Peter Ma (co-authors of the paper from TFA) on this very topic. Released only 10 minutes ago. I am only part way through but lots of great details here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dIfaDuDejs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dIfaDuDejs

af3d 4y ago

"Guys - we've found intelligent alien life! We have even decoded their signals." "Amazing, let's send them a response!" "Ah yes, about that..." "What is it? Go on..." "We're talking 250,000 light-years away. Their civilization is probably extinct by now." moans

astkaasa 4y ago
DO NOT ANSWER! DO NOT ANSWER! DO NOT ANSWER!

mromanuk 4y ago

> "Given that the main goal of this work is to apply an ML technique to identify signals with a specific pattern, we do not attempt to make a definite conclusion of whether these eight signals are genuinely produced by ET. We encourage further re-observations of these targets." [0] Don't hold your breath waiting for aliens just yet. 0: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-022-01872-z.epdf https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-022-01872-z.epdf

nyrikki 4y ago

While I would be happy if these were from extra terrestrial beings,IMHO they most likely will be something like further examples of Strange non-chotic dynamic systems like RRc Lyrae star KIC 5520878 which is also exciting

mc32 4y ago

Obviously they can't train this model on known alien signals so it seems this would mainly speed up sifting through signals that are out of the ordinary (known patterns).

jojonogo 4y ago

Considering that Google Bard spectacularly failed at basic history of the solar system even a child would know to be false, it is laughable that so-called AI could identify alien signals.

BEEdwards 4y ago
You think a child would know off the top of their head that the first picture of an exoplanet wasn't taken by the new shiny telescope in the news and not the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in 2004? That it's wrong about this isn't a problem because it's a basic fact everyone knows, but because it gets thing that people don't know wrong in a confident way. People will assume this answer is as good as looking it up themselves and never check it.

nl 4y ago

Code for the full pipeline including the autoencoder (and weights used) is available: https://github.com/PetchMa/ML_GBT_SETI https://github.com/PetchMa/ML_GBT_SETI

insane_dreamer 4y ago

> outperforms traditional methods in the search for alien signals since we have no ground truth nor have we (to our knowledge) received any alien signals to date, I don't see how you can determine performance in terms of accuracy; so maybe they mean an increase in processing speed

FinalBriefing 4y ago
Well, they can train the model on things we know _aren't_ alien signals. Edit: From the article: > To train the AI system, Ma inserted simulated signals into actual data, allowing the autoencoder to learn what to look for. Then the researchers fed the AI more than 150 terabytes of data from 480 observing hours at the Green Bank Telescope. The simulated signals were sounds that couldn't possibly be produced by any (known) natural astrophysical process. So, the model finds signals that have characteristics of artificially generated signals.
- insane_dreamer 4y ago
  yes, it can identify _unknown_ signals, but can't determine whether they are _alien_ or simply indeterminate natural phenomena
- mr_toad 4y ago
  Or it will identify novel astrophysical phenomena. Which is not a bad thing.

bhawks 4y ago

What is the likelihood that intelligent life develops encryption before radio communication and therefore any signals they send appear to be random noise? The Romans used encryption for military purposes and there is no hard precondition on developing broadcast communications before understanding the math behind cryptography. How improbable is it to imagine a society with deep end to end encryption communication?

TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
How improbable is it to imagine a society that doesn't need encryption? Clearly not happening on Earth, but hardly impossible elsewhere.
mr_toad 4y ago
> What is the likelihood that intelligent life develops encryption before radio communication We developed encryption before radio. It just wasn’t very good encryption by today’s standards. The problem is that your best encryption might be trivial to crack by a civilisation that’s thousands of years older than yours.