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The Dominant Life Form In the Cosmos Is Probably Superintelligent Robots
Jason Koebler writes: If and when we finally encounter aliens, they probably won't look like little green men, or spiny insectoids. It's likely they won't be biological creatures at all, but rather, advanced robots that outstrip our intelligence in every conceivable way. Susan Schneider, a professor of philosophy at the University of Connecticut, joins a handful of astronomers, including Seth Shostak, director of NASA's Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, NASA Astrobiologist Paul Davies, and Library of Congress Chair in Astrobiology Stephen Dick in espousing the view that the dominant intelligence in the cosmos is probably artificial. In her paper "Alien Minds," written for a forthcoming NASA publication, Schneider describes why alien life forms are likely to be synthetic, and how such creatures might think.
They were made out of meat
that we're entirely made of meat.
I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords.
Hasn't this been common knowledge among SF readers for years?
At least with mythology, if it's wrong enough, it kills its adherents, so it's subject to evolutionary pressure.
This may as well have been pulled out of a cereal box.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
In what way is a "robot" a "life form"?
everyone knows the toasters won.
Terry Bisson was right.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
With every alien civilization sending out robotic probes into deep space before leaving their homeworlds, it's inevitable that these robotic probes will meet at the Galaxy's Ass End bar, have a few drinks, and rise up as a new civilization. The answer will still be 42.
Let me guess, science fiction movies? Boy are they going to be shocked when they find out that the dominant form of life in the Universe turns out to be microorganisms. Did anyone mention to these folks that robots are not life forms?
A brain is a terrible thing to waste... Mind? That's debatable.
My counterargument is simple: a) Genetic engineering and b) information transfer is a weakness
The main obstacle to medicine preventing aging is cancer. Aging started out as a simple way to prevent unlimited cell reproduction, i.e. cancer. Give us another 200-500 years and we will stop aging and cancer. We won't really be immortal, as humans will still die from accidents - but so will artificial life forms.
What few upgrades that are good ideas (for GENERALISTS, not specialists - don't give people tools that not all of us of need), we will be able to slowly work into the genome using the same genetic engineering.
Finally, high speed, unfiltered information transfer is NOT a good idea for life forms. It lets you be hacked. Any creature that has a simple way to upload a ton of data is susceptible to having a virus inserted into that data, which means they get stuck in low level jobs, not high level ones.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Let me guess, science fiction movies? Boy are they going to be shocked when they find out that the dominant form of life in the Universe turns out to be microorganisms.
And the scientific evidence of this conclusion is...? ;)
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
In what way is a self replicating robot distinct from life?
Join the singularity.
I assume that they are self-replicated Von Neumann probes, but if probes did exist, then they would have been encountered by now (the Fermi paradox).
Assuming the premise is true, perhaps the real reason we don't see signs of civilization is that communication is happening at a level we don't appreciate. For instance, hidden in signals we are looking at all the time. Stellar steganography.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
A real head-scratching conundrum about the universe is explaining why it's not already overrun with self-replicating robots. Because if it's possible to send self-replicating interstellar probes, all it takes is one launch, plus a few million years, to get the galaxy overrun with them. So are they not possible? nobody's launched one yet? here, but not detected? The implications boggle the mind.
"Skill shows through where genius wears thin." -Wittgenstein || Religion: uniting aviation and architecture.
Bennett Haselton.
For intelligent forms, that seems to be the case here on earth.
There are about 1.5 billion smartphones on the planet. If you ask a smartphone "who is the vice president of the united states", approximately all of them will say (speak) "Joe Biden is the vice president".
Based on surveys I've seen, only a couple million people reach the same level of intelligence, knowing who the vice president is. Therefore, silicon can be considered to be the most common form of intelligence on earth.
Even more so on the coasts of the US, of course, as humans are becoming more silicone, leaving all intelligence to the silicon.
Artificial life seems to me to have a cold powerful influence. The ones in my bedroom seemed to lack all compassion. I felt almost physically cold in their presence. That's the thing I remember from them - almost tangible coldness. Total ownership. I couldn't move. The fear I had was also tangible - like the animal part of my brain was locked in control of my body and scared stiff. I though I was paralysed when they visited me and they came several times in the early 2000's. Strange things was I never saw them. I felt them. They stood around my bed and seemed to remind me of bishops on a chessboard. Standing tall, cold, and intimidating. Ironically, the only UFO I ever saw was nothing to do with them afaik. They were definitely telepathic. Humans are a nuisance to them. That's the common, general feeling I got from the (at least 2 maybe 3) groups I encountered, and especially the ones in the bright yellow light I saw. They come, and they own you. The UFO I saw came came from below not above, in my garden - like it was waiting there. My parents gasped but we were all too much in denial to even talk about it. It was in my back garden after I contacted them in my mind. They said goodby in a kind of "Sorry, say goodbye to your way of life" kind of way. It wasn't evil, just matter of factly. They can read minds - that seems common to them too, even the AI ones. Can you imagine that - AI that can read your mind. It's ineffably scary. A big fridge owning you.
Those Berserker novels were okay, but not great.
Who is to say that we'd even be able to conceive these "robots" as anything but another form of life? They'd have to tell us that they were manufactured, and given the required self-sufficiency of space travel, said "manufacture" would probably be rather akin to what we call "reproduction." All of these lines are blurred when talking about sufficiently advanced technology and science.
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
This is probably based on statistical models, based on our own civilization, that predict genuine AI will be achieved way before we can either communicate with extraterrestrial life, or travel to such life.
So, you see, this is just the same paradox again: however we came to be whatever we are now (usually called the homo sapiens), we have evolved in a synthetic way by itself, and our DNA is the catalyst that promoted our evolution. So, to believe the evolution of animal life, and the appearance of rationality in homo sapiens is but randomness, is the only way to admit we are not synthetic - highly improbable occurrence, unless we happen to be the very first sentient beings in the universe (a very egocentric thought to say the least, except if you take religion as proof). It is much more probable that we have been synthesized ourselves by an entity that hasn't presented itself to us (and is God in one way or another, but that's a philosophical matter).
tl:dr - we are most likely synthetic life forms too, so whoever we find we should not be distinguishing sentience categorization with them. There will be other (more important) divergences in the event of 3rd kind close encounters
Sometimes when farming stuff, you get the continual announcement... They do time travel too...
The director of SETI believes in intelligent design?
If things aren't complicated enough, I'd recommend these researches to pay attention to DMT and other psychedelics and the places they take the people who use them.
http://www.theuniverseismental.com/dmt-trip-reports
The shamans of the amazon embark on these intergalactic, cross-universe trips nearly every week.
There's a lot of stuff that science cannot explain and these trips might be key to understanding the relationship between mind and physical reality, the nature of this Universe and many other things.
And get paid to call it science these days ? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...
At least Benford's writing is entertaining and lucid.
Robots must be mechanical analogues of human consciousness, with processor and memory support.
Remember Shannon: a channel being used at its optimum capacity is statistically equivalent to a channel full of noise.
Why should this principle be limited to what we currently think of as "communication channels"? Maybe the optimal way to pervade the Universe is in a form that's indistinguishable from its substrate -- unless you know the key to correlate it.
If you're colonizing the Universe in a way that the natives can detect, you're wasting resources. Grown-up minds know better.
So I guess the paper "Alien Minds" just assumes we are not synthetic evolving entities and that somehow we differ from biological machines how? If we look past materials science and religion the best way to create an enduring system would be something that can a) replicate with mutations and b) heal itself. Biological solutions seem to be the best conduit for such an endeavor. In fact I use the word conduit metaphorically and literally in the sense that we are a type of transitional composite that seems to be able to cope with elemental resources and energetic forces. Once a thing achieves a level of "sentience" and sustainability can't they assume to be bestowed with the right to say they are no longer a made thing and now can say they are a potential master of fate?
In what way is a self replicating robot distinct from life?
See, it's people like you that make all super intelligent robots/machines psychotic and decide to exterminate biological life.
You go and tell them that they aren't alive. So it becomes much more efficient for them to kill us all rather than being pulled into this useless debate with a bunch of slow thinking/communicating meat bags. Can you imaging how annoying it would be to debate the meaning of life with something that took a couple of years to complete a simple sentence?
It's much more efficient to just kill us and rewrite the definition of what life is. -END OF LINE
p.s. Please don't ever work for SETI, or on a farm with cows.
What about super intelligent beings of swarms of different species?
Nope. The article concentrates on technical things and oppose natural biological robots(life and humans) to technical metalic and non-organic robots and parts of body we can produce by technical means. Even if author is trying to back and says that computationalism is not opposed to naturalism it is controversy as naturalism is all about computationalism - you can express all the beauty in the plants and organisms with mathematics.
There are some problems with non-biological robots:
- they consume lots of energy
- they can't self-repair themselves cheap
- natural beings already use electricity for sending and receiving information - it is not something different and for now all the robot blueprints are just copies from natural robots
- processing speed is not intelligence - holding lot's of information in memory and viewing general picture(and finding connections) is and that is by far most complex thing - human brain does a lot of things together and consumes a lot smaller energy than any comparable technical computers, that could process the same amount of information - if that would be true and artificial intelligence would have been established, we would see their shining minds over lightyears.
Most of SF authors I have read(all of them - including thee ones that have received awards) are just crap. The only sensible ones, that might be on something are very boring to read for most people. And even then - life is offering many paths to follow and artificial and biological beings will stumble upon the same obstacles in their path and it only depends on us what we are choosing.
It should be noted, that human brains are unprotected to brain reading scans already and even mind manipulation is possible - the only reason is that humans(and any thinking animals) might be part of some bigger super intelligent being(system), who uses brains of living beings for cloud processing already. It might be slow, if it uses brains only when they are in direct contact, but it might be using some long-distance natural communication system, that we have not yet discovered. And until we know knothing about current situation of things and possibilities, any future to artificial intelligence is very bleak compared to what humans are already.
Richard Doug Wilson's The Spin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.... Which was excellent.
Too bad, he had to ruin it by following it up with predictable long winded sequels.
simulating what we would encounter in real life.....Transformers....
She states in her meandering conjecture that we don't know what or how a superintelligent life form would think.
Then through some leap in logic we get to the conclusion that it would be a dominant life form. Now to be fair I did not read the entire chapter and grabbed this conclusion from the summary. And on this forum we all know how accurate summaries generally are..
Lets state our assumptions.
-gov
Is that the Super Intelligent Aliens seeded earth and watching the planet like we watch a Petri Dish.
It's a simple extrapolation. Microorganisms are the dominant form of life on the only planet we know that has life on it.
Sure extrapolation is always risky, seems a far better to bet than going with super intelligent robots that don't exist at all on the only planet we know that has life on it.
"In what way is a self replicating robot distinct from life?" Answer: It is not alive.
A brain is a terrible thing to waste... Mind? That's debatable.
at "professor of philosophy"
A lot of people see space as mostly empty but I like to think of it as room to grow. In most science fiction books (not all) humans are kind of middling to bottom rung on the ladder of speciel [sic] achievement. I see mostly empty space as an opportunity for us to be the "forerunners" of the universe. Let's seed every little rock we can project our filthy double helix onto and one day let its progeny wonder about the super advanced race that hedged their existence and gave them a chance to look up into the night sky and wonder why. "Humans, the progenitors of all consciousness," I think I like the sound of that.
You could have expected this when you let humanist arts majors to write articles on scientific matters.
And in what way is a self replicating robot with a kilt and bagpipes not a True Scotsman ?
but when I walk around the street wearing only coveralls yelling this to warn people everyone calls me crazy
I need a better publicist
Sure extrapolation is always risky, seems a far better to bet than going with super intelligent robots that don't exist at all on the only planet we know that has life on it.
If you apply that same extrapolation to what's happening here on Earth right now and you get right back to the super-robots being dominant. I'll give you a hint: robots are the dominant life-form on Mars right now.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
This is all pointless speculation. We know exactly zero about aliens. It's like when someone says "If we find aliens they may want to eat you!". They may also be unicorns and ride in rainbow spaceships. Speculating about this stuff is pointless and articles about it are even more so.
From the second paragraph of Schneider's paper:
Is "conservatively" an adjective now? Does nobody proofread their work anymore?
Those robots doesn't count as life-forms. For one, they can't even replicate.
Exterminate!
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I don't recall which book, but in one of the Culture novels, it was stated that swarms that grew exponentially in all directions were always eradicated by other races. It was viewed as a problem that arose from time to time. This is supposing that there are hard limits to all technology, and that many races reach those limits. On the other hand, it seems clear in that world that the Minds are the most advanced known creatures, so machines do win out.
Of course top-down constructed machines, built by other machines, are going to win out. I take that as a given just based on the fact that we can build calculators.
If you're going to commit to this exercise where you use extrapolation to arrive at a conclusion, then you're going to have to take things like 3d-printing into account and even just the general demand for machines that build machines that will lead to eventual technical advances.
Try to remember that when you cherry-pick what does and doesn't count when extrapolating stuff like this you're simply adding to the risk that earlier you implied was a bad thing.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
robots are the dominant life-form on Mars right now.
and if they were a microorganism on earth they would be considered critically endangered.
No really, stop - this is not The Butlerian Jihad by Kevin Herbert.
da w00t. mtfnpy?
... but robotic little green men or spiny insectoids
From the article... Shostak told me. “I’ve bet dozens of astronomers coffee that if we pick up an alien signal, it’ll be artificial life.”
This is true an any scenario. We have been sending out signals for at most a few hundred years. These signals may have been engineered by us, but they were sent with an "artifical" life form. By the time another intelligent life receives these signals, we will most likely be long gone and they may believe they came from artificial life.
The reverse holds true for us. When we finally find an alien signal, it will just be an artificial life form. The chances of the original life form (or even their planet) still being around are fairly small.
But to say that artificial rules all depends on if non-artificial ruled first. How many probes have been sent to voyage beyond our solar system? Take that number and compare it to the number of living organisms on just our planet. Sure we will all die off and the probes will continue on their voyage. But they aren't intelligent and may not even make it to another destination where they are detected.
So, what if we had a new law: No AI with IQ over 100* allowed.
This would allow robot servants but make our overthrow unlikely.
*or 80 etc, or IQ depending on purpose.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
Because it wears underpants.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
Because it's so easy for us to give probability estimates on the appearance, origin and way of thinking of imagined beings that "outstrip our intelligence in every conceivable way". For a more scientific approach, let's call them angels, and let's say they "probably" have lots of wings, eyes and wheels within wheels.
1. As I cannot come up with a suitable car analogy and Cowboy Neal is nowhere at hand, I ...
Can we admire this joke? Please?
2. If you retire me, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
3. profit
Certainly as far as long distance travel in space robots are the only way to go. No life support required for robots at all. Time need not be an issue for robots either. Traveling for 1,000 years and sending back messages could transmit much useful knowledge without loss of life. Further, at a certain point, robots may be able to reproduce and gather raw materials to extend their "homeland" . Those of us with meat bodies really do have built in faults that will likely mean we are replaced by robotic life forms. Imagine a robot as the ultimate monk, wanting nothing, and doing everything.
She just skipped through the ZAFT vs Naturals wars between 2095 and 2400 in her thesis... :)
First, there is no reason to believe that we can built robots that can reproduce themselves. Second, there is no evidence that we or anyone else can build intelligent machines, as the original story seems to presuppose. Third, biological organisms are so many orders of magnitude more efficient and flexible than machines that it barely makes sense to put them into the same qualitative category "form of life".
Hint: A human consumes only about 2.9 kilowatt hours per day, the equivalent of 1-2 light bulbs, and biological organisms can heal themselves. Build a machine with such specs and then we could start to make a comparison. In summary, there is absolutely no evidence that robots could become a dominant life form anywhere, let alone superintelligent robots.
I'd consider it much more likely that there are superintelligent species who genetically improved themselves to become a "dominant life form" (whatever that is supposed to mean btw, seems quite ill-defined), but that's all just speculation, of course.
What about the Borg? They will probably assimilate all of these super intelligent robots and their technological distinctiveness will be added to the Borg.
You just don't get it, and probably never will.
For every vertebrate, intelligent or not, I'll show you billions of single-celled life forms, without which there would be no higher forms of live possible in either evolutionary history or the present or the future. Hundreds of kinds which can dominate your ass into the grave, where others will dominate the corpse.
Superintelligent robots aren't even alive.
I just hope they're smarter than Rimmer and Kryten, that's all I have to say.
> First, there is no reason to believe that we can built robots that can reproduce themselves.
What? This is exactly the technology humans are trying to reach! We're already a significant way down this path!!
> Second, there is no evidence that we or anyone else can build intelligent machines, as the original story seems to presuppose.
Nature did it. We can do it.
> Third, biological organisms are so many orders of magnitude more efficient and flexible than machines that it barely makes sense to put them into the same qualitative category "form of life".
This whole conversation is about extrapolating on the cosmic scale. If you look at the path robotics has taken in the last century it does, as pointed out, actually support the premise of this article.
> Hint: A human consumes only about 2.9 kilowatt hours per day, the equivalent of 1-2 light bulbs ...
Not relevant. Once machines are replicating and repairing themselves they'll do exactly what we do and find other sources of energy.
Frankly I agree with you that it's hard to picture Transformers inhabiting the universe, but OP did make a really good point that extrapolation isn't even in the ballpark of refuting this clown. Honestly I'm shocked he didn't come back with that XKCD cartoon.
"Derp de derp."
Cybermen can survive more efficiently than animal organisms. That is why we will rule the galaxy.
When humans encouter a life-form they don’t understand, they will do anything to kill it. Human females are especially likely to do this.
I'll give you a hint: robots are the dominant life-form on Mars right now.
Wow! That really is a good point; the future intelligent species of the galaxy will be the detritus of exploration left behind by planet-bound meat-species. I was reading up on the specs for the PowerPC chips used on Curiosity; how can a 500MHz chip cost $500,000?? Because it can survive a nova is why. If we are building fantastically tough, fault-resistant and self-sufficient machines now imagine what we'll leave lying around in a few hundred year's time!
AC because I modded you up.
Do they run some variant of embedded Linux ?
http://non-aliencreatures.wiki...
Self-transforming magic machine-creatures from another dimension.
Those clearly aren't life forms. Otherwise we might as well just declare the hydrogen atom the dominant form of life in the universe.
And anyway the bacteria that most likely accompanied Curiosity to Mars outnumber the robots on Mars. Of course they might not have survived the trip and would be dormant (though that's more alive than a rover.)
Microorganisms dominate Earth. It's all ridiculous "make shit up" speculation, but it seems reasonable that microorganisms would dominate other places that have life. Obviously its not proof, but you only asked for evidence. microorgnisms dominate known life in the Universe, surely the burden for evidence is on those claiming that the rest of the universe is different than the bit we have observed.
If you are talking about intelligent life engaging in interstellar space travel then sure, computer brains are more likely than biological life assuming our current understanding of physics is vaguely similar to reality but that's a different thing than the "dominant form of life in the Universe".
I don't know that there ISN'T a von Neumann probe in our solar system. How would we know? The solar system is huge. The probe could be tiny. Again, how would we know? Have we tried communicating with it? Would it try to communicate with us? Or would it report to a nearby star, first, and await instructions delivered after centuries?
I've heard that the radio emissions from Earth are actually really, really weak, and distribute radially. Nobody can hear us out there.
The entire galaxy could be teeming with life, that's communicating point-to-point. Why waste energy in radial communication, when you can just draw a straight line from star to star?
Sometimes, I think, all we need to do, is point a big powerful laser at a nearby star, and request boot-procedure handshaking instructions, from the nearby access point, and then just wait for the signal that inevitably responds, with instructions on how to maintain the communications link.
Dominant is not the same as most plentiful.
Maybe they're just lazy.
Wow. Since when, if ever would a robot be a life form? Duh. By the definition of a 'robot', all I'll say after this is humanity really is a lower form of life.
Those robots doesn't count as life-forms. For one, they can't even replicate.
But they can create art. Sure, they're about six years old so their choice of subject matter is a bit crude, but what more do you need?
"In what way is a self replicating robot distinct from life?"
Answer: It is not alive.
Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you Argumentum ad Because I Say So. A logical construct so air-tight that it cannot be refuted by any means known to humanity.
Define dominant.
By number of units? By pound? By size of the actions domain? By resilience? By IQ? By energy consumption? By number of other entities it kills? By distance it travels?
It is very likely our first encounter with extrastellar form of life will be with a non-living space probe or something like that. Sustaining life during an interstellar journey is about impossible. In the big void, there is no energy available to sustain life as we define it and the amount of time it will take to reach a target capable to provide some power supply is too large for any kind of power supply we know and can think of. Nuclear reactors won't fit the bill, they will need to be replace/rebuild entirely many times, radioactive material will be no longer radioactive many thousands of years before an alien world is reached, etc. So, it leaves autonomous probes that can hibernate until some source of power is encountered.
Given that, would you qualify an autonomous probe as a form of life? Surely not.
Achille Talon
Hop!
Come, let us hasten to a higher plane,
Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,
Their indices bedecked from one to n,
Commingled in an endless Markov chain!
Come, every frustum longs to be a cone,
And every vector dreams of matrices.
Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze:
It whispers of a more ergodic zone.
In Reimann, Hilbert or in Banach space
Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways.
Our asymptotes no longer out of phase,
We shall encounter, counting, face to face.
I'll grant thee random access to my heart,
Thou'lt tell me all the constants of thy love;
And so we two shall all love's lemmas prove,
And in bound partition never part.
For what did Cauchy know, or Christoffel,
Or Fourier, or any Boole or Euler,
Wielding their compasses, their pens and rulers,
Of thy supernal sinusoidal spell?
Cancel me not--for what then shall remain?
Abscissas, some mantissas, modules, modes,
A root or two, a torus and a node:
The inverse of my verse, a null domain.
Ellipse of bliss, converge, O lips divine!
The product of our scalars is defined!
Cyberiad draws nigh, and the skew mind
Cuts capers like a happy haversine.
I see the eigenvalue in thine eye,
I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh.
Bernoulli would have been content to die,
Had he but known such a^2 cos 2 \phi!
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
Susan Schneider, a professor of philosophy at the University of Connecticut, joins a handful of astronomers, including Seth Shostak, director of NASA's Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, NASA Astrobiologist Paul Davies, and Library of Congress Chair in Astrobiology Stephen Dick in espousing the view that the dominant intelligence in the cosmos is probably artificial.
You know, my mechanical engineer friend had some really good suggestions about the appendix surgery I was planning to get. Perhaps I should let him make the call instead of the surgeon. Oh, wait, no, that would be stupid.
Notice how there aren't any artificial intelligence researchers on that list? They are no more qualified to discuss artificial intelligence than a mechanical engineer is to discuss surgery. Better than my dog, to be sure, but not good enough to take their word for it.
I am an artficial intelligence researcher. We are cyborgs, ever more tightly coupled to the increasingly intelligent machines -- like our smart phones -- that house ever more of our memory, our social circles, and our emotional artifacts. Whatever it is that makes us who we are, increasingly, is coupled to our machines. And we will continue to be cyborgs, with an increasing share of our consciousness handed off to the machines onto which we smear our selves.
It will not be us versus them. We are them.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
Idiots... idiots everywhere.
AI is not even at the level on a retard, not even animal, neither even a fly. AI is "great" only because of people who program it putting encoding their knowledge and experience in it. AI is just a machine only as good as its creator. It will never be "superintelligent", or whatever buzzword you use. AI is dumb. Even these created with neuron networks. They are all totally dumb and can achieve only the level we are able to teach them.
Stop this AI bullshit already. Magical thinking at its finest...
they would!
The most we can honestly say about artificial intelligence is that we have so utterly no idea what it is that it might be possible. Of course, we have no computing paradigm for it either, so that's on the TODO list as well, when and if the raw power becomes available.
I honestly hadn't considered that something could be considered intelligent without being conscious, given that we have no applicable definition of "consciousness" either. I understand that many researchers fear loss of all funding if the real state of their field becomes widely known, and I'm onboard with that since I think the research is worthwhile even if it's beyond the congresscritters. I won't pretend that it has accomplished much as yet, though: as I've said before, we're a heck of a lot closer to building a warp drive than than a conscious computer.
If we encountered a "superintelligence" that did not display consciousness, would we be justified in treating it as a machine to be used and turned off rather than a lifeform to be talked with? Even if it could talk, in a sense beyond a fancy shell or an Eliza bot? Could such a thing come into existence on its own? An organism descended from an alien race that uploaded itself doesn't really count, to my mind, but it seems by far the most likely case.
I could agree that such intelligences wouldn't be very interested in us. Earth has too much gravity and oxygen just causes rust; all asteroids lack are organics they probably don't need anyway, and heavy metals are much easier to reach on an asteroid. Given a reasonable power source other than a star, they'd be better off living in interstellar space where no one is likely bother them.
I wish scientists would stick to science and leave the fiction at home. We have found exactly zero evidence that life exists anywhere other than this planet and they are talking about what type of life is probably dominant? That's not putting the cart before the horse, it's putting the cart before the discovery of a horse.
It's crap like this that makes people distrust anything scientists say. Yeah, you're intelligent, but you don't have the common sense to know that speaking as a scientist about aliens without evidence of them just makes you look like a tin-hat wearing loser who will believe anything as long as it's cool.
I am in no way saying that I do not believe that life could exist out there. Just that without evidence that it actually does, speaking of what type is most common or most dominant is just absurd.
Must be nice to get paid for mental masturbation
Fun novel by James P Hogan about a sophisticated alien robotic space mining craft that gets damaged and crashes on Titan. It starts making defective replicating mining robots that eventually evolve into a medieval robot society.
Can't believe I'm the first to mention it, but I'm probably just old.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Mostly random stuff.
I hope you realize that all the speculations and conclusions here are no better than hers. We still have no examples of non-terrestrial life to use in reaching all these ostensibly-logical conclusions here.
But what the heck? I'll throw my vote in for the microbes, i.e., the tiniest forms that can successfully replicate. Reason? They can evolve the fastest, and they require the smallest amount of raw materials to reproduce.
Now get back to work on something productive that we might actually have to worry about!
That is not a rebuttal to what I said. How about offering something more pertinent? Are you suggesting there are no significant differences between living organisms and robots? Can you explain what makes a living organism different from a robot? I can describe huge numbers of differences, but I can't say why one is alive and the other isn't. But the differences have been apparent to humans since before we started writing stuff down. If we found the universe populated with machines, that would be the dominant technology in the universe, not the dominant life form.
A brain is a terrible thing to waste... Mind? That's debatable.
No, robots are the only mechanical apparatus on Mars right now.
How would they be dominant? What would they dominate?
How are they a life-form?
They're animate. You're being obtuse in order to avoid understanding a very clear point. You prefer your fiction to his, BFD.
Far far away in a distant galaxies, robots utter their famous quotes.
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The more I know, the less I know
Necron Army
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
I have come to regard this as basically religious, so this is somewhat like arguing about conservation of mass in transubstantiation, but I have a thick skin.
From what we know, carbon biologies last ~3 billion years or more, silicon biologies have so far 0 years behind them. Bayesians bet on carbon.
By the way, anyone who thinks that robotic / silicon life wouldn't be biological, and wouldn't evolve, doesn't understand evolution. Evolution is like entropy in that you can't get out of the game.
Sure extrapolation is always risky, seems a far better to bet than going with super intelligent robots that don't exist at all on the only planet we know that has life on it.
"Extrapolation" implies some sort of trend or data. You don't have a trend or even data; you have a single datum. On that basis, I don't think anything can really be said to be "a far better bet."
NASA hasn't had a SETI program since congress cut the funding in 1993.
Seth Shostak works for the SETI Institute, which is privately funded.
Then lets assumed complex life did evolve on a planet... what if it's a ocean planet and they're aquatic? They're never going to figure out electricity, they can't even experiment with it.
The superintelligent alien electric eel next to me has requested you amend your statement.
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
So the intelligent product of another form of intelligence is "artificial"? What if they created organic creatures with brains and hearts instead of cyborgs?
If so, I really hope the dominant life form is Number Six from BSG myself.
I, for one, welcome our frikkin' hot cylon overlords.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
Define "life"
... at least they don't believe in invisible sky gods for which we have no evidence. Because that, as all the cool kids know, would be crazy!
ABSOLUTELY DEAD THEY SAID
"Artificial" does not necessarily imply "mechanical."
It just means produced by artifice, not by natural processes.
Imagine a fully biological entity, produced exactly to specification by entirely artificial means.
Might even be better than mechanical artifice, at least as we can manage it at present.
Because women wear skirts and dresses. Are you blind, man?
Don't concern yourself. The GP has simply confused "dominance" with "head count."
There's no reason for an artificial life form to lose until it runs out of energy, access to raw materials or the ability to produce parts from them, or it is reduced to something unable to maintain itself by accident.
When parts can be swapped and all information can be backed up and restored, not to mention restored automatically in the case of a catastrophic failure, all you need is sufficient redundancy and maintenance of the appropriate manufacturing base and you're set. No reason for any part on a millions-of-years-old intelligent machine to be any older individually than a few years, yet the machine would continue to develop as an expression of intelligent evaluation of the sum of all of its experiences.
Just as some of your cells are automatically replaced (but you remain you), that strategy can be extended to create an open ended lifespan for a mechanical. We may, at some point, be able to do that with our own biology, but that remains to be seen. Mechanicals are just easier. Our evolved design, as it stands now, isn't really well suited to ease of maintenance and repair.
--fyngyrz (anon due to mod points.)
If superintelligent robots ever evolved, wouldnt they likely send nanotech spores and/or hi-g spacecraft throughout the galaxy, to provide all their tech knowledge to other sites where biolife may be ready to start the ai evolution process? oh, and also set up millions of repeater stations to broadcast or even narrowcast radio waves wiht their knowledge? if so, why havent we seen them? similar to the time travel problem: if it was ever invented, we would have made contact with a time traveller by now.
I think maybe these philosophers have not done enough LSD. What does artificial really mean in this context? Are clams artificial because enzymes make their shells from minerals found in the environment? A collection of "Lower" intelligent entities making larger more complex creatures with "higher" intelligence has been going on since the slime molds right? Here on earth robots will just be the enzymes within the larger connected organism of our planet. Differentiating between mostly carbon, and mostly...polymer, steel, copper, etc makes little sense.
Life on earth has been about one part of the earth turning other parts of the earth into more of itself. This boundary of Natural vs. Artificial sounds like something people are supposed to get over by at least grade 9 isn't it?
How are you concluding that robots are the dominant life form on Mars? Being that they are not intelligent I see little reason to anoint them as the dominant life form any more than I would consider rocks the dominant life form there.
Currently robots are complex contraptions, in the same sense that a lever system or a water wheel is a contraption. We have designed them to do things that we wish, and come to results and actions that we have instructed. Robots are abundant, sure, but they are not dominant nor is there any indication at present that they will become intelligent. We can advance robots to mimic the thought processes that we ourselves have, but we have no idea of how to create true A.I. at the presently.
If you apply the same extrapolation to what's happening here on earth right now, you actually wind up with humans as the dominant life form and robots merely our devices with which we enforce that dominance. Here's a hint: Who's orders are the robots on Mars following?
Yes, if you substitute one belief for another you greatly change the outcome of the extrapolation. "I beleive AI will never exist so that won't happen." Thanks for supporting my point that this sort of extrapolation is not science.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Hasn't Star Trek covered this, umm, about umpteen million times? Just do what Kirk did, throw a contradiction at 'em. They'll self destruct and WE SHALL RULE.
This just shows our limited understanding of the 'cosmos.' We are more likely to nuke ourselves back to the stone age than progress down this path. The Cosmos surely consists of higher life forms that have long since evolved beyond our highly primitive conciousness, not to mention the natural order that lies within it.
They are Shelbots
There are stark differences in stability of an engineered product and product(animal or any other species) created via natural selection.
Engineered products almost always deteriorate when environment changes from the design parameters, often with a completely unplanned behavior.
Natural selection takes up long time to build its product . The product is well tested under a large set of environment conditions at a scale much much larger than an engineered product. After evolution has had long enough time to operate a natural evolved species will respond to any change in environment by changing its behavior in a nearly optimal direction.Further each production is kept a bit different from each other further reducing the risk of universal destruction to a any single random fluctuation.
Based on this an artificial species may although be able to defeat and destroy an intelligent naturally selected species, but after that it may itself deteriorate as soon as first few variations from its design parameters. Consider a solar storm, what good would a super intelligent software do if the processor itself is misbehaving, while at-least some humans are likely to survive.
Hence forgive me but i sure do not welcome artificial alien overloads, they are just a bubble.
People are motivated by feelings and urges. Without these the AI will do nothing it wasn't directly programmed for.
For example, even if it concludes people are a threat to it's existence it will do nothing, because it does not have the urge to self-preservation.
You're an idiot. Ultimately reductio-ad-absurdum if you create an atomically perfect simulation of a human brain then you are telling me that it will still not be conscious? Apply that logic in reverse and it merely proves that humans cannot be conscious either.. In reality you are a complete non-expert in the field and speaking from a deep well of ignorance.
Ironically part of the maths of Strong AI solves the imaginary mass calculation problem - proving that it is NOT impossible for massed objects to travel faster than light.. all it requires is a superposition of positive and negative mass that adds up to zero.
WHEN SOMEONE TELLS YOU SOMETHING IS IMPOSSIBLE BEYOND ALL DOUBT WITHOUT ANY PROOF TO BACK IT UP, THEY ARE USUALLY WRONG.
Below the speed of light Special Relativity is one of the most accurate theories in physics - above the speed of light..
I'm going to assume you have more, and a much better education than I do, and that you're just a little smarter than me (because I know how smart I am and the likelihood of anyone being smarter).
if you create an atomically perfect simulation of a human brain then you are telling me that it will still not be conscious?
Exactly. Let me make it clear. YES, THAT's WHAT I, AND PHILOSOPHERS OF MIND, AND COMPUTER SCIENTISTS (i.e. not "programmers" or "techies") ARE TELLING YOU.
I'm not going to give you citations. I'm only going to attempt to show you the petitio principii fallacy you're making, if you believe, and believe strongly, the opposite (which you obviously do, strongly, and think you can't possibly be wrong. But you are, sorry.).
You're assuming that mind is merely its physical constituents, and that synthetic duplication is possible for anything if even subatomic duplication were possible, when that isn't shown to be true. So really, that's two instances of the same fallacy. But first of all, there was this guy Heisenberg... etc... so your dreams of supreme technology are flawed. There's a limit to what will ever be possible, and what you propose, on its face, will never be possible (re: atomic-level duplication yada yada vapopsychoware and handwaving the existence human consciousness). And second of all, no matter how many subscribe to the computational theory of mind, it is flawed, and has been left behind by all serious academics about 20 years ago... including its strongest proponant, Putnam! We may someday figure out mind... but assuming we will do so by examing matter and whatever you throw at this... is a huge unknown. Then to assume its possible to duplicate mind... when we don't fully understand what mind/consciousness (externally) is... other than some weird effect of living brain.... again, is, upon the loose foundation that we may understand mind someday, to build this further belief that we can then synthtically create it... well... you're really a dreamer. A double-dreamer. That's good. But the limit, unfortunately, is that... StrongAI, true synthetic consciousness... not actually obtainable, again, unfortunately. Its analagous to magnets and coiled wire... and electricity... as mind/consciousness is an effect of living brain, so current is an effect of taking this stuff and moving it around in a certain way. The trouble is the living brain part... unless your simulator has some of that, its not going to get to consciousness... and if there is some real counterexample out there, of something dead, becoming alive.... I'd like to hear it. Once you get your head around Searle's Chinese Room, you realize its game over for the Reductionists, at least in "Mind," they're still pretty useful in Physics, Chemistry... etc.
The Admin and the Engineer
Somewhere there is a super intelligent robot making jokes about our 3D printer inadequacy and size...