Look For AI, Not Aliens

krou writes "Writing in Acta Astronautica, Seti astronomer Seth Shostak argues that we should be looking for 'sentient machines' rather than biological life. In an interview with the BBC, he said, 'If you look at the timescales for the development of technology, at some point you invent radio and then you go on the air and then we have a chance of finding you. But within a few hundred years of inventing radio — at least if we're any example — you invent thinking machines; we're probably going to do that in this century. So you've invented your successors and only for a few hundred years are you... a "biological" intelligence.' As a result, he says 'we could spend at least a few percent of our time... looking in the directions that are maybe not the most attractive in terms of biological intelligence but maybe where sentient machines are hanging out.'"

Comments

Re:It gets sillier all the time.

[fyngyrz]

That link returned a bunch of psychological soft stuff, no hard science at all, at least in the first few pages. Not saying you're wrong, but there was nothing there to back you up.

Not seeing where it really puts a significant lean on AI anyway, frankly - even assuming it's exactly right, it's a broad statement about people, who vary enormously, yet generally still cope reasonably well. I expect that an AI would adapt to whatever differences there were and that would be the end of it.