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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!
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.
... 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.
"we should be looking for 'sentient machines' rather than biological life"
So you are saying there is a difference between those two?
...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
Look for them on planets like Neptune. Cold gas giants. Plenty of hydrogen for fuel, and plenty of cooling for the heat sinks on their supercomputer brains.
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?
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
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.
We already are. Red light is in the visible spectrum.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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)
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 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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
Sentient machines are fairly unimpressive. They are all around us.
Sapient machines... now THAT would be something.
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