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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 in
by 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 agoThat 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 agoThe 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 agoNails it, sadly. Thanks for sharing!
- etrautmann 4y agoAlso succinctly explored in "When the Yogurt Took Over" Love Death + Robots.
- scubakid 4y agoFrom 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.
- machina_ex_deus 4y agoYou 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.
- nyrikki 4y agoNatural selection is variation, differential reproduction, and heredity. A mostly mindless and mechanistic process of which fitness and mate selection is only a tiny part. Isolated populations have more of an impact than mate selection due to regression to the mean at population levels.
- tshaddox 4y agoConsider that some meaningful part of most people’s mind is indeed intelligently designed by the people who deliberately raised them from birth (generally their parents primarily). Our theory of mind, cultural name ethical norms, etc. are in many cases the result of deliberate design. Of course, our hardware is mostly not intelligently designed, so that would be very different for AGIs. But I suspect AGIs would identify much less with the hardware their mind is running on than humans do.
- goatlover 4y agoThe android David in the alien prequels Prometheus and Covenant has that problem. Which is why he finds the xenomorph-goo based life forms more interesting.
- O__________O 4y agoAssuming 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.
- jacobsenscott 4y agoNeeding at least 3 round trips to establish an ssl connection to the alien internet - things won't get interesting for a few thousand years.
- knowledgepowers 4y ago"Responded" could be execution of payload.
- mulmen 4y agoTurns out it is just 18 hours of static.
- nocoiner 4y agoSo many of my favorite references in this thread. I was delighted to find Neuromancer at the top of the comments, and this here.
- LargoLasskhyfv 4y agos/just/exactly But 'Interesting. Please continue?'
- mulmen 4y agoThe implication is that the AI follows instructions to make contact but the human operators then misinterpret the results as static.
- LargoLasskhyfv 4y ago
- nathias 4y agoai that talks to other ais grown on other bio substrate
- shagie 4y agoFrom Accelerando... (talking about an alien signal) "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously," she suggests. "Nope," replies the cat. "It was more like: 'Greetings, earthlings, compile me on your leader.'" ... The cat yawns. "I could have told Pierre instead." Aineko glances at Amber, sees her thunderous expression, and hastily changes the subject: "The solution was intuitively obvious, just not to humans. You're so verbal." Lifting a hind paw, she scratches behind her left ear for a moment then pauses, foot waving absentmindedly. "Besides, the CETI team was searching under the street lights while I was sniffing around in the grass. They kept trying to find primes; when that didn't work, they started trying to breed a Turing machine that would run it without immediately halting." Aineko lowers her paw daintily. "None of them tried treating it as a map of a connectionist system based on the only terrestrial components anyone had ever beamed out into deep space. Except me. But then, your mother had a hand in my wetware, too."
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ericsoderstrom 4y agowait what. I just read neuromancer and don't see how that applies? Were rio/wintermute ever involved in detecting an alien signal?
- alephxyz 4y ago(spoilers) In the final chapter, the merged AI tells Case it found transmissions from "others" in the Centauri system.
- nocoiner 4y agoAnd I’m pretty sure that it was meant to be a reference to the Wow! signal from the ‘70s. And I think at the end of the final book of the trilogy, a similar thing happens, except this time the virtual constructs of the characters get to go to Centauri via galactic cyberspace.
- BruceEel 4y agoSurely not everybody's cup of tea but that line is one of the reasons why I like the original audiobook so much (the abridged version read by Gibson himself - not the Audible one). His voice gets distorted on reading the AI's lines to make him sound more eh AI'ish. It's just a silly little filter but it somehow makes the exchange between Case and the AI sound rather terrifying.