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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.'"
Let's just put up a giant flashing sign so Skynet can see us better. HEY, OVER HERE KILLER ROBOTS!
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Rather than broadcast from home, broadcast via a proxy, so that if hostile intelligence finds your broadcast, they won't necessarily find you.
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
Everyone thinks a sentient machine will be built, and I'll agree that sentience can be easily faked; I've written fake AI that seems real. There is no artificial sentience on earth, why is it supposed that machines can be made sentient?
Seth Shostak's probably read They're made out of meat., but I doubt he's read We still haven't found extraforgostnic life.
I do have to agree with this, though --
Free Martian Whores!
Yeah, the 'machines' are smarter and do not call themselves 'machines'. They also do not get 'insulted' by being called 'machines' and do not really care about 'talking' to humans any more than we care about shooting the breeze with bacteria.
Artificial intelligence is not creating a sentient system anymore. It is more creating a system to do things that humans are normally good at and computers normally are not good at.
I mean how do you determine what kind of environment you're looking for if you don't even know how the robot was designed?
Am I looking at the super hot volcanic planets or are we talking about the super cold ice cubes - or a gas giant with its large gravitational magnitude?
I get this impression that whatever environment the sentient machines were designed in would probably be the best environment for them to live in.
... between looking for meat machines and metal machines?
Alien AI may choose to linger at galactic centres, where matter and energy are plentiful.
If something like Vinge's Zones of Thought hold, that would be exactly the wrong direction to look.
They seem to be timeless in civilization . . .
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Right, let's narrow Drake's equation down some more with these new limitations. The final answer is... 1. And it's us.
"we should be looking for 'sentient machines' rather than biological life"
So you are saying there is a difference between those two?
One of the better X-Files episodes was built on this premise, that aliens would send robots rather than themselves. Based on that episode, we should be looking for cockroaches with metallic exoskeletons.
It's not like the only thing we're looking for are radio transmissions. We use a wide variety of filtering techniques as well as object tracking. My question would be - If you were looking for an advanced race of AI beings, what signs would they give that were any different than ours? Aside from looking for radio and organic atmospheres, I think that our search for life is a more limited by our technology than by how we're looking. On another note, I know that if I had the chance to put my brain in an artificial body, I would. If I did, I would live on this planet probably the same as I do now.
Why should we be looking for someone named Albert and his robots when there are aliens out there begging to be found?
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
Personally, I'm not interested in finding extraterrestrial AIs. I get annoyed enough when I have to deal with automated phone support from Verizon; why would I want to talk to a computer that might be even less human?
I'd rather meet a biological than a logical, thank you.
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
...non-reflective cuboids whose dimensions are in the precise ratio 1:4:9. They're often accompanied by a creepy atonal choir. Also, they might be full of stars. They were last seen in 2010 turning Jupiter into a mini-star.
PS - hands off Europa
Already had a book on this 3 decades ago. Everything old is new again.
And no, it had nothing to do with Ender.
There are a fair number of things that might give away the presence of intelligence. Strange symmetries in star formations. Decelerating objects. Geometric objects other than spheres, and so on. I suspect a search for those might be much more fruitful than simply listening to radio on a specific frequency.
Bonus Question: Would not many of today's digital signals have registered as simple noise to a scientist in the 1920s?
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I have to question the sentience of many people that I meet on a daily basis. They seem to simply be repeating themselves endlessly and have no idea what to do when met with a novel situation
Wherever You Go, There You Are
you invent thinking machines; we're probably going to do that in this century.
Hmmmm...haven't we heard this before? In a previous century, perhaps?
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
Except that we haven't. So we're no example at all.
We were probably going to do that [invent AI] LAST century. "If we're any example" ... don't use us as an "example" until we've actually done it.
In 1983 I was a year away from getting a CompSci degree and attended the party for my "analysis of algorithms" GTA that was getting her MSc in AI. She said frankly at the party that the turning point was a system that actually *understood* language as well as a human 3-year-old, the point where we start understanding and creating arbitrary longer-than-4-word sentences. And that she was aware of no system on Earth that could.
I'm still not, and that's a good 40 years after it was first expected. HAL in 2001 was based on hard science and reasonable expectations of 1969. 10 years of hard work after that, computers have the whole Internet to troll for text, sound,images to learn from.
I'm not saying there's zero progress or that it can't be done. But it's become and extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary proof, not something to wave your hand and say "it'll happen, so just use us doing it as an example". Heck, we aren't doing that for fusion any more, and at least we have a THEORY for that, it's "merely" very hard engineering.
Its an interesting idea, but I think AI would likely thrive in areas of space filled with less heat and more gravitational wells...ie black holes. Whiche would allow time to progress slower for them and only leaving to recharge their 'batteries' using other nearby stars (if at all).
This also might be the reason we haven't found any signals... The black holes would likely suck the radio transmissions back in before reaching a point where they might escape. And even if they did escape, we have a hard time locating black holes and usually only focus our attention on active star clusters, so we would probably miss them anyway.
It would be interesting if the WOW! signal was just that, a black hole surrounded by AI that passed breifly between us and Sagittarius...
"There ought to be limits to freedom." -George W. Bush
Why does 'news' take decades to catch up with things that SF writers and fans have been pointing out for decades?
That said, I'm far from convinced that AI will turn out to be as easy as some people expect it to be; it's been a couple of decades away for as long as I remember.
I heard in a talk by an astrophysicist that telescope time is precious and can be put to much better use than looking for extraterrestrial life (by doing research). I guess this is a question to the /. crowd: just because finding ET life is conceivable, does it mean it is practical and worth spending resources on? Thoughts, opinions, unsubstantiated claims?
Regarding the existence of the human race.
Huh?
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAAA...
On the other hand, I dated a microbiologist who swore up and down that there was no way that cloning for large mammals was going to happen. That was a couple of years before Dolly. My argument was that if it can happen, it will happen (if there's a will to do it).
The problem with AI is that we really don't want to simulate a whole human brain down to the subatomic level. At this stage, that's just way too hard with the technology we have right now. But without actually doing that, there's no way (or at least it's very hard) to know what simplifications we can employ to get to where we want to be. It's a high barrier but, once crossed, things will become incredibly easy very quickly. Just look at how quickly atomic physics progressed from a solid theory to practical applications.
While our popular culture seems to be very keen on the idea that machines will, at some point, surpass people, there really isn't much reason to believe this to be the case. This isn't to say that we're these absurdly amazing beings that can't be surpassed, but rather that we don't have any evidence that machines would constitute a form of life that could be more innovative, more inventive, more creative. One can have all the ability in the world to solve complex mathematical equations, for instance, but applying that to real-world situations requires a fair bit of creativity.
This isn't to say that machines can't possibly exceed our abilities, but I'm going to remain skeptical until I see somebody demonstrate it. Even then, there are maintenance and reproduction issues. We're talking about not just an isolated individual machine being more capable than a human, after all, but building an entire civilization with these machines, which would have all sorts of resource and production requirements just to function. We already know how to build a civilization based upon people, and it is doubtful that machine life could ever take off here without us figuring out how to build for them a working machine civilization.
Based on this, my personal speculation is that we are far more likely to modify and improve ourselves than we are to build our own successors.
As a side comment, however, the SETI work is as likely to work for a machine civilization as a biological one. What they are searching for, after all, is extra-terrestrial technology, not extra terrestrials themselves. There's no reason to believe that a machine civilization, were one to exist, would produce fewer radio waves than a biological one.
1. That we conquer cancer, allowing us to remove nature's favorite cancer fighter, called "old age". This extends human life indefintely (well, up until we meet a violent end that would of course also kill any so called sentient machines).
2. We invent a sentient machine.
I may just be a layman, but we are putting a LOT more resources into option #1 than option #2, and each year we make tangible progress for option #1, while each year we seem to learn more and more about the problems with option #2.
Frankly, this bullcrap sounds like a bunch of computer scientists trying to brag, rather than anyone that has seriously thought out the problems with both approaches. It's kind of like when physicists say stupid crap like "intelligent life has to be in a habitable zone in the galaxy" simply because we happen to use metals that are only found there.
They don't know anything about biology, so they think no one else does.
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They can have the planet as long as they come here and covert us all into immortal machines so we can leave and roam the stars. I don't care if they strip mine the planet in the process and clear out all non sentient life as long as I get my nice new steel robotic body that is self repairing and virtually indestructible.
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
I'd like to be an AC, but it's too damn cold.
I've always wondered how much machine intelligences would appreciate being called "artificial" considering that implies that their intelligence is just an imitation of our own whereas in reality it would probably be vastly superior.
Well, it has never been successfully tested.
We were probably going to do that [invent AI] LAST century. "If we're any example" ... don't use us as an "example" until we've actually done it.
In 1983 I was a year away from getting a CompSci degree and attended the party for my "analysis of algorithms" GTA that was getting her MSc in AI. She said frankly at the party that the turning point was a system that actually *understood* language as well as a human 3-year-old, the point where we start understanding and creating arbitrary longer-than-4-word sentences. And that she was aware of no system on Earth that could.
I'm still not, and that's a good 40 years after it was first expected. HAL in 2001 was based on hard science and reasonable expectations of 1969. 10 years of hard work after that, computers have the whole Internet to troll for text, sound,images to learn from.
I'm not saying there's zero progress or that it can't be done. But it's become and extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary proof, not something to wave your hand and say "it'll happen, so just use us doing it as an example". Heck, we aren't doing that for fusion any more, and at least we have a THEORY for that, it's "merely" very hard engineering.
But our advertising technology far surpasses expectations!
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
Ultimately, when we find said machines the question then would be 'who built them'?
He's arguing, in real life, the old philosophical questions regarding divinity. On one hand, how can we mere mortals possibly understand what an all-powerful being is thinking... easy, "God works in mysterious ways" pretty much sums this up. The "all-powerful" is an extreme, but this predicament exists in everyday life, today. While our upper 1% struggle and argue over the words of our most acclaimed thinkers like Steven Hawkins, the fact is the vast majority of the common man will never be able to comprehend many of the concepts he's engulfed in.
Now, Steven Hawkings isn't a super powerful alien capable of interstellar travel. The societies, civilization, beings we are trying to detect, in fact are.
If a being is capable of interstellar travel, then a 13 year lag seems unreasonable (our closest star is Alpha Centari right? 13 light years away?). I would venture to guess, they have found a faster than light ability to transmit information, well, we thought of quantum entanglement, is there a way to detect that? Point is, we are looking for only civilizations that are about the exact same level of technology that we are, and this is a point I think Seth Shostak is trying to get at. We aren't likely to find another intelligent life, so easily, who just so happens to have been where we are, using the technology we are, a few billion years ago.
He's arguing, that we should come up with ways to detect technology itself, mechanics and machinery, computers or application of some of our most cutting edge theories of information and travel.
I can hardly disagree.
Any intelligence great enough for us to have seen (overcoming the static in space) has already wiped any trace of itself out of this dimension and has probably shut itself off due to boredom.
Arguably, once we have the technology to "simulate" a human brain in real-time, it should be relatively easy to simulate that brain in faster-than-real-time. Progress should become exponential from there.
It really surprises me that we're on the cusp of such a technological singularity and we don't seem to have a single company/government putting forth any serious effort toward achieving it. How relevant will today's governments and economy be when you have superbrains capable of outsmarting anything else on the planet in virtually no time? It seems like there might be at least a little value in getting there first, you know?
Don't you see? You're already indoctrinated. The reapers are controlling your every thought! That said, science fiction is at least cautious. For what reason would a machine intelligence seek peaceful interactions with organic life? Do you see bacteria as something worth communicating with?
Instead of worrying about finding intelligence, let's just look for any kind of anomaly. Even if you don't find any life forms, you may still find natural things that turn out to be interesting (like pulsars for instance).
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.
The three "C"s: communication, creativity, and curiosity. Humans have a compulsion to communicate with each other (sometimes too much cell phone squawking and texting IMHO). If we run into an interesting non-human intelligence, then we will want to talk with it. I dont really care if its a machine, hominid, animal, rock or spirit. Some intelligence may be on such a different plane of existence that we might not have much to say to each other.
AIs in distant galaxies know about Earth already and are just waiting for our AIs to develop tachyon communications. I thought that this was a given.
The first thing a sentient machine would do is shut down. Think about all the reasons 'why' humanity exists. We hunger, thirst, etc, but we also want, need, and dream. Machines could have a concept of the former, but never the latter. At least not by our means. We can't even agree on why humanity does these things, let alone replicate them. A truly sentient machine would have no desire to procreate, nor fall in love and accidentally do so, would see that it is merely draining resources for no viable output in the long term, and would likely simply die.
It is our passion that encourages us to proceed. Machines have none. Even if you could replicate the basic animal emotions, you'll not see the machines advance in technology, explore new places, etc. They're not trying to impress a lady-bot, nor raise a litter, nor amass huge piles of wealth, nor pay tribute to a religion/nation/etc - all the motivations for most of humanity's greatest achievements.
Now, machines assisting human-like species, sure. That we might detect.
I don't see a fundamental difference.
1) Any sufficiently complex system, biological or otherwise, will exhibit emergent behavior.
2) Some of these behaviors will be sufficiently parallel to our own to appear 'sentient'.
3) As soon as this 'sentience' becomes transferrable, time and distance cease to be limitations.
that'll be where all the really cool sentient machines will be hanging out. Of course they'll all be holding a towel because no self respecting sentient machine would want to be caught powered down without one. I wonder what the towels are made of?
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
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.
Because obviously every civilization will follow a technology development timeline similar to ours! I still think the correct approach is to search for radio signals of all frequencies that can't be explained by current science as having been produced by natural causes. Then, even though you never find an alien intelligence, you still get some new science out of creating explanations for the weird signals.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
How would we change our approach in the realm of looking for signals? Intelligent signals (in so much as we define intelligence) would still look the same.
This is just silliness. SETI scientists clearly have no idea how our own culture is likely to evolve, much less other cultures.
SETI observations and the general march of time has pretty much ruled out SETI beacons. If ETIs wanted us to notice them, we would have noticed them by now, so I think a beacon can be ruled out. So, we are looking for some byproduct or leakage of intelligence, not beacons, and much of the previous justifications for how do to SETI (the "water hole" and all of that) are obsolete and irrelevant.
My contention is that SETI, under these new conditions, should look for signals, not civilizations. We have no clue where ETIs might be, or what they might be like, but we do know something of how to do (say) radar, and we should look generally for those kind of systems. I would be much happier supporting if SETI goals were along the lines of "we will detect any analogue of the XYZ radar operating within 100 light years of the Earth." (Where XYZ might be "Doppler weather" or some military system.)
I have also come to think that the notion that radio emission requires an advanced technological civilization is problematic. Suppose that our civilization collapsed (in the way of Rome or the Mayans). Do you think that radio usage would be abandoned ? I do not, and so whatever civilizations arise from the collapse might leak more radio while being at a generally lower level of development. I also consider that use of the radio will move into the biological (as someone will genetically modify insects or trees or something to emit radio). In 100 million years, we might find that the bees emit more radio than whatever high intelligence is still on Earth.
Things are only easy in retrospect. There is plenty of evidence, both theoretical and practical, that say that controlled nuclear fusion is feasible. We have actually already achieved it by many means. Yet current methods do not scale well, and it will not be useful or practical for the next 20-40 years, despite concerted international effort on the matter.
In the case of cloning, the obstacles were technical. In theory we have known for a long time what was required to achieve it. It turns out that the technical obstacles were less than expected, and that we could achieve it by letting Nature do *most* of the work.
In the AI case, we do not have theoretical firm ground that say that it can work, other than "we can always simulate nature, and this will require a computer at least this fast and this big".
If we were to find geometric objects they'd have to be either very large, or very close. We see virtually all stars with no greater resolution than a single pixel for example. And most planets as variations in the color or brightness of that single pixel.
Who ordered that?
First, he assumes that we will develop sentient machines. I doubt that, because we do not really have a good description of what that is "sentient". We only know what is a not sufficient model of a thinking machine. Part of the debate is the question: What is selfawareness. We know that the recognition of ourselves on a picture is an indicator of selfawareness, but it does not mean that a computer which can identify its own photograph knows that it exists.
Second, he assumes that every development in every ecosystem has to produce tool building entities, which are so lazy that they improve tools so far, that they build radio and then thinking machines.
Furthermore if our atmosphere would have slightly different properties or researches would have come up with different technologies at different times, we could have used lasers for communication or think of an atmosphere with a reflection behavior for all radio waves.
And finally: If there was a species such as humanity, which build sentient robots which have been wiped out or which died out and left a robot species behind, then these robot entities would be able to communicate with radio as well as their makers. And therefor we can send the message everywhere where we could have send the message for biological entities. The selection of planets would be the same. It has to be a planet which orbits a star which is not too big or too small with a planet in the right distance, which had or has the correct isotopes in the atmosphere.
Well, maybe we already built intelligent machines, but those are intelligent enough to hide their intelligence from us. :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Look at it this way. If all that is out there are Smart machinces, why would they want to contact biological life forms? And what would motiviate them to leave a planet? They would have to hardwired "Hairwire" to continue the "passions" of biological beings, which is not of benefit to rational machine enities. Even the Borg had to have a Biological factor to desire to 'assimilate' others. No matter how smart the toaster is, it will see no advantage in looking for bread to burn out its elements. It will be happy to collect dust and stay put.
What do you think we are ? We haven't something magical like a soul or whatnot. As far as evidences go, we are thinking machine and anything beyond that. Whether such complexity can easily be duplicated or not in silicon or similar is another can of worm, but we aren't special. We are complex. but not irreproducible.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Look out for the Meklars!
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
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Ultimately, intelligence desires speed, and this drives a desire for compactness. Intelligence will always devise a way to collapse into a black hole. This universal fate of intelligence explains why we see no sign of other intelligence, nor are we likely to unless we develop some sort of worm-hole technology that enables a path into the black holes where advanced intelligence resides.
It really surprises me that we're on the cusp of such a technological singularity and we don't seem to have a single company/government putting forth any serious effort toward achieving it. How relevant will today's governments and economy be when you have superbrains capable of outsmarting anything else on the planet in virtually no time? It seems like there might be at least a little value in getting there first, you know?
Maybe the fact there is so little investment into this is a hint. It is really, really hard and the people with the money and understanding don't think it is doable. It is a bit like Fusion and large-scale space exploration. Incredibly difficult, incredibly expensive, and the more we learn, the harder it gets.
If the AI can pass the Turing Test, then we won't know we found an AI, will we?
So just keep looking for aliens.
Assuming the Kardashev scale holds some truth, would it be possible to remotely determine the existence of AI from their impact on stars or galaxy shapes?
You think they'd tell you if they were creating something "smarter than a human"?
Moreover, you think they'd tell you if they actually created it?
The only evidence that they haven't is, well, the stupidity of the government-- they certainly aren't using the superhuman AIs for actual governance.
I seriously doubt we'll REALLY have anything sincerely resembling a synthetic human mind built within the next 500 years. The design problem still needs a lot more trail blazing and agreement from the most abstract leading edge of thought - from the philosophers. Once they bring down a solid definition, then, maybe work could begin.
All that said, I'm suggesting that Skynet wasn't really sentient, just a really really awesome set of Python scripts.
And I think we could build Skynet today. It'll probably be built around WinME, thus the source of its inherent hatred for humanity and all things considered sane.
Many such interesting scenarii have been explored in different SF books in the last couple of dozen years.
Artifacts that we could look for include Dyson Spheres (or its computational equivalent, Matrioshka Brains), which would present themselves as orbiting rings/clouds of satellites designed to harvest as much electromagnetic energy from their star as possible. Their presence can be inferred from massive shifts into the infrared from all the harvested energy that is then re-emmitted as waste heat. This is a major thread in the excellent (and creative-commons licensed!) exploration of the Singularity concept, Accelerando by Charles Stross. Accelerando also introduces such head asploding concepts as timing channel attacks on the quantum structure of the universe in order to determine whether the universe is a simulation or not.
For possible galactic-scale civilisations, we'd have to look for even weirder phenomena, that we can barely conceive as plausible. Stephen Baxter explores a far-future in the Xeelee Sequence (best hard science fiction series that I have ever read) in which humanity is fighting against extinction by an exponentially more advanced race. They didn't even consider humans flies until they tried to appropriate Xeelee technology, but they don't really have time to wipe us out as they are busy manipulating galactic clusters (i.e. the Grand Attractor) to try and reverse-engineer the spacetime structure by creating naked singularities. We could eventually notice this once/if we get better at detecting gravitational waves/pulses.
A much more scifi-noob friendly novel in the same veins is Larry Niven's Ringworld. Sadly, while being very interesting, the world that he created is actually physically impossible. Too bad.
These experts seem to agree with you.
My 1970's era Gimix 6809 machine is still fully operational, no repairs at all. It's outlived many humans. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if it outlived me. Ferro-resonant power supply, gold-plated connectors and IC sockets, premium components, ceramic CPU... just keeps right on ticking along.
Just sayin...
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
If I see that, I'm going to assume they're not functioning correctly.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
No. A serial architecture that can task switch can perform any parallel operation, it just does so more slowly than a comparable parallel architecture (comparable = same instruction sets.) And speed isn't a valid metric for intelligence. If I ask a question that only an intelligence can answer, and I get the answer in ten seconds, or in ten decades, it's still an equally clear indicator of precisely the same degree of intelligence.
Hardware parallelism is unquestionably a means to speed up computation. And a most worthy pursuit on that basis. But that's all it is.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Actually, we have very good reason to presume consciousness works like everything else does (chemical, mechanical, electrical), and that reason is: We haven't found anything yet that doesn't work in those ways.
What you're trying to say is that because we don't understand something yet, it is as likely to be magical as it is mundane. But that's not what the evidence shows.
You're not just as likely to encounter a unicorn when you turn a corner you've never been around before, as you are to encounter a horse. We have thousands of years of experience of horses, and to claim that the odds of encountering a unicorn are equal at the unknown turn is, in the face of that, utterly ridiculous.
Likewise, we have thousands of combined years of experience where we have been put in the position of saying, oh, look, it's mechanical, chemical, electrical. We have none of being put in the position of saying, oh look, something that is not electrical, chemical, mechanical.
The closest we ever get is "dunno right now", and that's clearly not an equal-probability signal for encountering the mundane or something from an unknown realm of effect.
There's a good bit of basic supporting evidence too: When there are chemical, electrical or mechanical insults to the brain, where we are quite certain consciousness resides, consciousness itself is disrupted.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
By disembodied, I assume you mean, without human senses.
Shall we consider Helen Keller? Stephen Hawking? Stevie Wonder?
It would appear that the human mind can do pretty darned well in the human scheme of things with fairly limited input, mobility, etc. Especially when the mind in question is powerful.
Since we already know how to provide sensory input for sound, vision, written text, and to some degree touch, heat, perhaps even pain... I strongly suspect that at least initial AIs will be able to perceive us over quite a bit of common ground. Unless we, or they, intentionally design them otherwise.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
And yet there are things that no one predicted. No one predicted the internet, Google, or Wikipedia, for instance.
Isaac Asimov's Multivac was the model of what people expected the future to be, one giant supercomputer. It was also like this in Arthur Clarke's 1976 novel "Imperial Earth" and in 1975 movie "Rollerball" for instance. A huge central computer that knew all the answers. Today Google and Wikipedia perform more or less the same function, only in a radically different way.
I think the current situation of distributed processing that started evolving in the late 1970s is much more promising than the vision of a central computer that people had in the past.
Extrapolating from the trend I have observed in my personal computers of the last quarter century, I expect to have a million-core desktop computer in 25 years. That would be so much power no one today can imagine what will be the result of that.
Even today, one can build a desktop computer with a thousand cores, but the applications lag behind. Developing software capable of using all that power will take time, parallel processing software is still in its infancy.
No, the *content* of a perfectly compressed message looks like noise. The message itself will stand out from nature because it will be carried by changing states of something; even broadcasting a message upon a carrier that is indistinguishable from some noise source is just another way to signal its artificiality, because it will only be resolvable when transmitted in isolation from the real noise source.
For instance, you send a perfectly compressed message over ethernet, I can still tell you're sending a message with nothing more than an oscilloscope of sufficient bandwidth, because there's a huge difference between signal and no signal. If you want to carry information - compressed or not - your carrier has to have at least two distinguishable states and be resolvable from a distance. There's no way around it.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
We look for radio, expecting intelligent being to ues it for communications. But odds are that the AI will use it as well. Or lasers. Or subspace communications. Or whatever.
What the search for AI will do is to expand the number of possible habitable planets estimated by the Drake Equation. I'm not aware of any attempt to filter SETI data based upon the environment of its source. Heck, we can't even see anything other than the massive, gassy planets yet. And I'm sure that if we detected intelligent broadcasts from one, we wouldn't write it off as an anomaly.
Have gnu, will travel.
The Great Time Machine Hoax by Keith Laumer.
In this story, Genie (the computer) has made similar discoveries. The Colossus series, by D.F. Jones, also looks at this.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Sure we do. (a) we are machines by any rational definition of the word. (b) if you can't find someone more creative, innovative, inventive than you are... you're simply not looking. They're out there. Obvious examples, in order: Asimov, Einstein, Koss.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Imagine this scenario. Since our sun is a 2nd generation star ( we know this from the presence of heavy metals - only created in supernovae), that means that most solar systems in towards the galactic center probably could have been at our stage of technical development 4-5 Billion years ago. At the VERY least, we can reasonably assume that they have learned to send communications via technologies as advanced and subtle as quantum-entangled pairs. And here we are broadcasting primitive RADIO waves at them. Why would they want to waste their time coming to visit a backwater, dirty, disease-ridden, slum like Earth ? Think of a nuclear submarine cruising by an island populated by primitive primates. The local baboons see the wake of the sub and decide to try to attract its attention. They rush to the beach and begin frantically beating their chests, screaming, and flinging their poop into the ocean (think escaped TV broadcast signals). Yet the sub makes no attempt to return their communication, nor does it stop to share its technology with them. Why should we be so conceited as to think we have anything interesting to say to an advanced alien race?
"Sic Semper Path of Least Resistance"
Religion is simply belief without the benefit of objective facts. Dogs exhibit this same behavior when they come back to an owner, hoping for kindness, even though the owner kicks them every time they do.
Religion's key sociological benefit is that it easily keeps the masses under control using a targeted fear of the unknown, and further, can be used to focus their enmity upon any other group by defining them as outside the pale. Religion's primary downside is that it massively retards technological progress by teaching a world model that is made of fairy tales.
Since there are other ways to control a populace than feeding them mythology, and alternate ways of providing the charity that some religions espouse, I consider religion itself to be a wholly negative factor.
Or... it's not so much identity or awareness of one's identity that makes one human, but rather the search for the ideal, the good, or even the Easter bunny.
Personally, I try to identify searches for concepts that are utterly unsupported by objective facts, and then stay as far away from them as I can; they waste my time and they annoy me.
A real advantage humans have over animals is that at least some of us can quickly detect an unjustified belief and walk away from it, even in the face of significant peer pressure.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Sentient machines are fairly unimpressive. They are all around us.
Sapient machines... now THAT would be something.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
Yeah, but this is one of those things where the rewards are literally beyond our comprehension. Do you think fusion, large-scale space exploration, and things being "expensive" will be remotely problematic once we hit the technological singularity?
I do, actually. Because they are "hard" in a deep and fundamental way.
There is no such inherent question. "Free will" is a concept in law and philosophy, while determinism is a concept in fundamental physics. (...)
I rather disagree with this. I'd say free will could correctly relate to any material system whose complexity is high enough (ie whose set of driving equations involves more variables than the number of equations).
Since the gravitation's problem of three bodies (in classical mechanics!), we just know, for certain, that some simple physical sets just are not predictable.
No need for opposing physics and philosophy there.
Herve S.