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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.'"
A machine with a decent power source wouldn't be bothered by a 100 year travel time, while humans would just get the ship all dirty and stuff
That would be a huge advantage in spreading between stellar systems, especially if you want to make a good impression when you arrive
Wherever You Go, There You Are
... between looking for meat machines and metal machines?
"we should be looking for 'sentient machines' rather than biological life"
So you are saying there is a difference between those two?
Please cite an objective, testable definition of "sentience" that can be used to prove that all normal humans are sentient and that no machines are.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Why wouldn't they be able to? We're all made from the same basic components, all we need to do to be able to make sentient machines, is figure out how humans are able to be sentient. Personally I doubt that'll happen in the next century like the summary says, but I don't see any reason why it would be impossible.
We are all God's parents.
When I was a kid, I feared the post-apocalyptic future offered by the Mad Max movies, et. al. I thought that was the worst possible fate that humanity could face in the future. Now, I survey the reality television landscape and realize that maybe killer mutants with shouldpads and mohawks wouldn't have been so bad after all.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Creating THE FIRST sentient machine is a hard task. After intelligence becomes easily scalable, the next generation of AIs is a breeze.
Fixed that for you.
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"Why would it appear to be random noise?"
"How would we decode it?"
It is a big stretch to say that because you cannot decode it it would look like a random noise. I cannot read Chinese but I can recognize it from random noise. The argument is invalid - to recognize a message, we do not need to understand the message.
One of the great arguments against UFOs has always been the extreme distance they would have to cover to get here and the difficulty of covering that kind of distance hauling a biological entity. Alpha Centauri is 4 light years and change, and it'd be a substantial effort to fly to Earth with life forms.
Drones would make so much more sense.
Similarly, nothing uncomputable seems to occur in our brains.
No, but every time we've tried to emulate it, or even understand it, we found out that it's a whole lot more tricky than it seemed. It's a bit like fusion, which is always "just 20 years away", in 1960, in 1970, in 1980,... up until today.
More importantly, as science begins to understand the mind-body link better, it appears more and more likely that human-like intelligence requires a human-like body. A disembodied intelligence is likely to be very strange and very much unlike us.
And finally, the entire area of emotions has just begun to catch the interest of AI researchers, while brain scientists are finding out that it is a whole lot more important to the whole thing than we thought, that you can not take it away and end up with an emotionless, but otherwise human being.
So if you want an AI that you can chat with and that understands you, the order is quite tall. You need to understand and code not only reasoning, but also understand and emulate body-feedback and emotions. And at this point, since we don't even know how they work in the human brain, we have no idea how to do that.
My personal belief is that we won't replace ourselves with machine intelligence anytime soon nor anytime not so soon. I'd rather look towards genetic engineering and embedded (into our body) computers than AI. When we finally build AI, it will be for similar purposes than brains in animals evolved - to control a large, complex machine, like a space station or big space craft. As such, it will likely have the senses and the mental processes to deal with that. It may have a feeling comparable to our "hunger" when its energy reserves run low, and react by turning the solar sails much like we would go and eat something (hm, more like a plant than an animal, but you get my drift). It would have emotions, but none that we can relate to.
Would it consider us its master, or view us much like we view the bacteria in our guts? Would it even think in terms like that? It's hard to know.
So don't be so quick with assuming that there's machine intelligence out there. There may not be, or they be so alien that neither of us recognizes the other as an intelligence.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Not to put a damper on all of the AI / Singularity frenzy, but one of the big unsolved problems of the future is the inefficiency of artificial systems. Bio systems have evolved over millennia in constant competition for resources. Natural systems make the most use out of the available matter and energy. Manufactured systems have a life cycle that is many orders of magnitude less efficient than bio systems. They use exotic materials in industrial processes that are energy intensive. Imagine being a creature that relies on large amounts of Indium, Gallium and Arsenic, megawatts of energy and so many exotic chemicals to repair one's self and to reproduce. Our current technology just isn't near close enough for an explosion of AI machines. Without reproduction, these machines are unlikely to spread beyond the solar system in numbers that will make them easily visible to SETI. That means that biological intelligence has the potential for a long history ahead.
There is no artificial sentience on earth, why is it supposed that machines can be made sentient?
Because nothing says it is impossible. Who argues it is impossible to send men to Jupiter's orbit with regular rockets ? We haven't done it yet but nothing in this project seems impossible, it is just a matter of cost and engineering. Similarly, nothing uncomputable seems to occur in our brains. In the worst case, a computer simulating neurons (yes, a simplified model, there are many reasons to argue that this is sufficient) connected in a network that would be copied from a real human brain would display intelligence. We don't have powerful enough computers or precise enough IRMs yet for that, but there are no theoretical impossibilities. That is why we suppose that machines can be made sentient. I personally think that it will happen before we manage to copy a human neural network, but it gives a higher bound to the difficulty of the problem.
Useful data to consider when we get to the matter of simulating neural networks is how much progress we have made in simulating simple natural networks which we have already completely characterized structurally.
We have one such network in the model organism Caenorhabditis elegans (a tiny worm). After many years of work its nervous system has been completely mapped: it contains 302 neurons, 6393 chemical synapses, 890 gap junctions, and 1410 neuromuscular junctions.
So we must have simulations of C. elegans little brain running, right?
Nope, not even close. We are still in the early stages of simply characterizing the behavior of these 302 neurons. It will only be after many more years of research that we would understand what it does well enough to make a reasonable simulation. Forget IRM (I think this is a different acronym for MRI), being able to dissect the entire nervous system neuron by neuron and probe it directly at every point is not enough (yet) to describe what it does.
Now imagine trying this on a neural network 50 million times larger that you can't dissect at will, and which has correspondingly more complex behaviors.
Still should be possible in principle - but the level of difficulty is immensely higher than "singularity" theorists would have you believe.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Now, I survey the reality television landscape and realize that maybe killer mutants with shouldpads and mohawks wouldn't have been so bad after all.
Try changing the channel in a Mad Max world.