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

Oh great

[elrous0]

Let's just put up a giant flashing sign so Skynet can see us better. HEY, OVER HERE KILLER ROBOTS!

Re:Oh great

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's just put up a giant flashing sign so Skynet can see us better. HEY, OVER HERE KILLER ROBOTS!

On the one hand, the complete annihilation of humanity (and perhaps all biological life on this planet)
On the other hand, the end of reality television shows.

That's a tough one.

Re:Oh great

[oodaloop]

You're anthropomorphizing robots again. They'll fucking kill you for that.

Re:Oh great

[elrous0]

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.

Re:Oh great

[julesh]

Phillip Dick wrote Second Variety ten years before that third-rate knock-off. If anyone deserves credit for being ripped off, it's him.

Except that Berserker is a much closer match to the article's idea. Second Variety describes robots we created waging war on humanity (i.e. it prefigures Terminator). Berserker at least comes close to the theme of TFA: alien AIs that we make first contact with. And then they start trying to kill us. Much more relevant.

Of course, Berserker itself had earlier antecedants, and perhaps A for Andromeda is an even closer match to what the article is talking about, particularly as it discusses the result of a SETI-like program. I believe it may be in the sequel, Andromeda Breakthrough, that it is revealed the intelligence that originated the messages is an AI.

So, well done Shostak: you're only coming at this idea 50 years behind the SF writers. ;)

Re:Oh great

[Raenex]

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.

Re:Oh great

[elrous0]

I live in Alabama. You really want a challenge, you should try looking for intelligent life here.

Also a better way to CYA

[Anonymous Coward]

Rather than broadcast from home, broadcast via a proxy, so that if hostile intelligence finds your broadcast, they won't necessarily find you.

Re:Also a better way to CYA

[ThePangolino]

Oh yeah!
Let's put a relay on the Moon. If they come all the way thinking they'll find us all they'll see will be a big antena!

Re:Also a better way to CYA

[WrongSizeGlass]

So you're talking about a fork of Tor with a very specific purpose?

Makes sense...

[garyisabusyguy]

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

It gets sillier all the time.

[mcgrew]

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.

"Why was that, Doctor Fielgud? Did you detect electromagnetic communications or something?"

"Of course not. Any electromagnetic communications would be completely drowned out by the radiation from the system's star. 'Listening' for electromagnetic radiation is futile; no way would we ever hear another intelligence's electromagnetic communication, and even if we did it would appear to be random noise."

"Why would it appear to be random noise?"

"How would we decode it? We can't even decode our own prehistoric writings from the arthrolothic age without some sort of clue. Were it not for the bugatti stone, we never would have been able to intrerpret the Argostnic's writings."

I do have to agree with this, though --

Many involved in Seti have long argued that nature may have solved the problem of life using different designs or chemicals, suggesting extraterrestrials would not only not look like us, but that they would not at a biological level even work like us.

However, Seti searchers have mostly still worked under the assumption - as a starting point for a search of the entire cosmos - that ETs would be "alive" in the sense that we know.

That has led to a hunt for life that is bound to follow at least some rules of biochemistry, live for a finite period of time, procreate, and above all be subject to the processes of evolution

Re:It gets sillier all the time.

[John Hasler]

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.

Re:It gets sillier all the time.

[KarlIsNotMyName]

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.

Re:It gets sillier all the time.

[Yvanhoe]

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.

Re:It gets sillier all the time.

[Bwian_of_Nazareth]

"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.

Re:It gets sillier all the time.

[drdrgivemethenews]

Sentient: having an awareness that most other sentient beings are fucked up.

Re:It gets sillier all the time.

[Tom]

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.

Re:It gets sillier all the time.

[Yvanhoe]

Actually, no. It is close to impossible. A neuron is nothing near the kind of machinery you need to make a quantum effect have macroscopic result. Cascade reactions from a single particle event do not happen in neuron cells, do not get amplified. For a neural impulse to be transmitted, you need thousands (very low estimate) of molecules to travel through a gap and this huge number is enough to iron out any quantum oddity.

I know many philosophers and social science types love this hypotheses, and love the fact that you can't completely prove it wrong until we implemented a sentient machine (just as you can't be definitely sure that humans can travel to Jupiter without becoming crazy) but they propose absolutely no theories about how this translate into what we know about neurons. There are no such theories in the neurobiology field and no phenomenon seems to require a "quantum magic" hypothesis to be explained.

Make no mistake about it : people who talk about unspeakable quantum phenomenon to explain thoughts are just people who are uncomfortable about the idea that we don't need any soul-thingie to explain sentience and consciousness.

Re:It gets sillier all the time.

[careysub]

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.

Newsflash

[dawilcox]

In order to find a sentient machine, we need to create a sentient machine. Creating a sentient machine is a hard task. Early AI researchers thought it would be possible and set lofty goals of creating machines that would do amazing tasks. However, that all changed with the AI winter.

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.

Re:Newsflash

[gestalt_n_pepper]

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.

What's the difference...

[pEBDr]

... between looking for meat machines and metal machines?

Re:What's the difference...

[ciantic]

From the article,

"Dr Shostak says that artificially intelligent alien life would be likely to migrate to places where both matter and energy - the only things he says would be of interest to the machines - would be in plentiful supply. That means the Seti hunt may need to focus its attentions near hot, young stars or even near the centres of galaxies."

So they should be looking at places usually hostile for biological life.

Re:What's the difference...

[Abstrackt]

... between looking for meat machines and metal machines?

Meat machines have the potential to be delicious.

it's the same thing

[mestar]

"we should be looking for 'sentient machines' rather than biological life"

So you are saying there is a difference between those two?

Be on the lookout for...

[pedropolis]

...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 astronomic size artifacts, not just radio

[gestalt_n_pepper]

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?

This makes sense

[swb]

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.

Big assumptions

[labradore]

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.

Re:The Unthinking Depths?

[Daetrin]

I certainly doubt that something exactly like the Zones of Thought is likely to exist in reality, but there are all kinds of potential reasons why the idea of looking in galactic centers might be the wrong track. If someone was looking at the earth and for some reason couldn't immediately detect our cities, then following the same logic they might expect our largest and most advanced civilizations to be on the equator. That's where the most life is and where the most energy is available from the sun. The center of the galaxy may be a great place for civilizations (either biological or AI) or it might be a horrible place, it's impossible for us to judge given our current state of knowledge.

Intelligence always implodes

[gregor-e]

We are exceedingly unlikely to ever find other intelligence. The reason for this is that as matter makes the phase transition from non-intelligent to intelligent, it quickly leaps from slow biological substrates to much faster and smaller non-biological substrates that can think millions of times faster than biological substrates can. One important consequence of this increase in experiential speed is that subjective distance also grows by several million-fold. A trip to the moon, which might take only 100 human subjective hours, would take 55 thousand years of subjective time for intelligence operating at 5 million times human intelligence. By the time any intelligence made it just to the moon and back, the intelligence it departed from may have evolved to an unrecognizable state. The notion of spending billions of subjective years just getting outside of their local solar system would make any such exploration unlikely. Plus, the non-intelligent matter of the universe is remarkably self-similar and not very information-dense (i.e. space is boring).

.

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.