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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
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.
In what way is a "robot" a "life form"?
If they're able to manufacture more robots, then it's life... but not as we know it.
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
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.
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.
Sure robots are life forms, like us they think, feel, have an uncontrollable urge to sing folk songs when magnets are attached to them, etc.
Those Berserker novels were okay, but not great.
I think the simplest (hah!) and most general/versatile definition of life is:
An information pattern embodied in a physical mechanism (mechanism here being defined loosely as a class of configurations and processes of matter and energy) which is such that the information pattern is capable of influencing the state and evolution of the physical mechanism and its environment in such a way as to increase the probability of sustained embodiment of that information pattern (or an informationally close relative) in local (causally connected) matter and energy.
To be lifelike, the information pattern must be capable of increasing its own (or its informationally close relative's) sustained embodiment for longer than would be expected by chance, given the physical regime of the environment (the forces acting, and the thermodynamic regime).
Note: It is not sufficient to conserve AN AMOUNT of information (beyond that expected) locally. It is required to conserve the SAME information. The loss of same information (information pattern) with time can be measured in bits/second change in a maximally compressed bitstring representing the pattern. The conservation of information pattern can be measured in bit-seconds.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
The director of SETI believes in intelligent design?
And get paid to call it science these days ? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...
At least Benford's writing is entertaining and lucid.
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.
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.
1) It's very hard to make autonomous self-replicating robots that can colonize an unknown planet. 2) Stars are extremely far apart. 3) Nobody cares enough to solve these huge challenges for no particular reward.
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.
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.
No, some statisticians have actually done the math. Basically if you built such a thing and it could only do something like 25% of the speed of light, it would only take them 300,000 years to overrun the entire galaxy.
I think the answer will turn out to be that the universe is in fact crawling with life. But space fairing intelligent life is very rare.
Take for example, Mars. I think we will find life there... and heck, pretty much every planet. But it's going to be single celled... if it even has "Cells" at all.
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. They're not even going to be able to do fire much less a rocket. What if they're terrestrial but the gravity is slightly stronger... rockets are nearly impossible as it is, imagine if we were at 2g!
And remember, we still have a very good chance at wiping ourselves out before we ever get to another star.
I'd like to see your proposal for a device that can "only" do like 25% of the speed of light, take a massive payload to an unknown planet, and can land safely.
A real head-scratching conundrum about the universe is explaining why it's not already overrun with self-replicating robots.
Nah, that's easy : it actually *is* overrun, what else do you think all the dark matter is?
These robots are monoliths with ratios 1:4:5. Because they are black and full of stars, they are very hard to see against the cosmic background.
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.
"Give us another 100 years..."
No way.
I already gave you 100 years and I'm still waiting for my flying cars and my underwater cities. You wasted your credit.
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.
Aren't we a robot too? A very advanced one.
Nope, I'm an operator.
(Etymologically speaking, robots are manual workers, labourers. I'm a trained professional who works at desks, tables and flipcharts.)
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
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'
this planet is overrun with microorganisms, everywhere we look, how do we know were aren't the von neumann probes?
we are self replicating, bacterial spores can survive extremely long periods in a vacuum so it stands to reason they could planet hop and there are some theories life here might have come here from mars anyway.
maybe we just can't see the forest for the trees.
"if you built such a thing and it could only do something like 25% of the speed of light, it would only take them 300,000 years to overrun the entire galaxy."
Yeah. Now try redoing the math with something that just makes 0'001% the speed of light and then, in order to replicate, they require readily access to some elements in the high part of the the periodic table.
>The shamans of the amazon embark on these intergalactic, cross-universe trips nearly every week.
No they don't. Drugs allow you to explore your own mind, and imagination, not to actually explore the universe. That's just a drug-related-delusion.
http://non-aliencreatures.wiki...
Self-transforming magic machine-creatures from another dimension.
In what way is a "robot" a "life form"?
When they are the ones holding the death rays, they can be called whatever they like.
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
Yeah, maybe I just need to imagine a 10 pound 3D printer where you can feed rocks in the top, and sophisticated nanotechnology drops out the bottom.
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'd like to see your proposal for a device that can "only" do like 25% of the speed of light, take a massive payload to an unknown planet, and can land safely.
We humans already have engines capable of doing it...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...
And remember, the probes would be robots, so they could handle hard deltaV that would kill us.
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.
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.
Define "life"