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The Dominant Life Form In the Cosmos Is Probably Superintelligent Robots

Posted by Soulskill on from the quick-destroy-all-the-remaining-copies-of-Battlebots dept.

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.

9 of 391 comments (clear)

  1. This is worse than mythology. by ShieldW0lf · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

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    -1 Uncomfortable Truth
    1. Re:This is worse than mythology. by Empiric · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Meanwhile, evolution kills 100% of naturalists, and the only thing that actually survives is information.

      So, you may at least want to leave a light on for, say, Platonic ideal Forms. Or the robots' software.

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      ~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
    2. Re:This is worse than mythology. by Immerman · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Perhaps because it's insane? We have a half-billion years of evolution shaping our brains into something reasonably stable, and we're not exactly rational beings. What makes you assume that all the artificial minds we create will be stable? Especially the early ones would seem almost guaranteed to have serious issues.

      Or perhaps because some idiot sets one of it's objectives to be "minimize human suffering and death" without considering the implications. For an AI without free will all it takes is one slip-up that places "do X" at a higher priority than "let us stop you" and you've got a fair chance that somewhere along the line "kill all humans" becomes an optimized solution.

      It doesn't even have to be a bug - one cosmic ray flips the wrong bit and suddenly the negative two million weighting you gave to "exterminate humanity" becomes positive.

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      --- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
  2. What Bullshit by gurps_npc · · Score: 4, Interesting
    The basic argument is that they can be: 1) Effectively Immortal 2) Upgradeable. 3) Information transfer.

    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.

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    excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
  3. Re:they really are talking, we just can't hear by itzly · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Any sufficiently advanced communication technology is indistinguishable from noise.

  4. Re:Well, duh by khasim · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Well if you look at what has been "common knowledge" in SF in years past ...

    And she gets her terms wrong.

    Knowing that we are not alone in the universe would be a profound realization, and contact with an alien civilization could produce amazing technological innovations and cultural insights.

    The universe includes all the galaxies. Our sun will probably burn out before we get a message from another galaxy. Stick to your own galaxy. That is difficult enough.

    Which brings up the next error:

    Even if I am wrong -- even if the majority of alien civilizations turn out to be biological -- it may be that the most intelligent alien civilizations will be ones in which the inhabitants are SAI.

    SAI is her term for "superintelligent artificial intelligence". So she has just written a tautology. Unless you want to get into super-superintelligent or ultra-superintelligent.

    And the rest is more of the same.

  5. Re: von Neumann probes by sylivin · · Score: 4, Interesting

    It may not be feasible or even desirable. The problem with unlimited mechanical replication is the same problem that happens with biological chemical replication. Errors. You might think digital copying is error free, but that is incorrect. The storage medium can and will cause errors. Self-checking and quality control helps, but eventually any mechanical life form will end up with their version of cancer - an undiscovered error that causes system-wide malfunctions. An intelligent AI would probably realize that unleashing self replicating machines around the galaxy will eventually cause the formation of a group of crazed insane machines that reproduce out of control, and such a group would be a direct threat to it. Remember that errors in biological systems are taken care of by cells that murder malfunctioning ones. In a galaxy-wide mechanical system they would be no way to find, track, and take care of a probe who's children turn cancerous at such distances.

  6. Amateurs. We Are Cyborgs. by Bob9113 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

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    Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
  7. Code of the Lifemaker! by 50000BTU_barbecue · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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/...

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    Mostly random stuff.