Something Similar to the AI Revolution May Have Happened at Other Points in the Universe – The Daily Galaxy –Great Discoveries Channel

As humans we should be proud of any AI systems we bring to existence, as if they were our children. In just the same way as we educate our kids, we could endow such systems with the blueprint for their future interaction with the world, observes Harvard astrophysicist, Avi Loeb in an email to The Daily Galaxy. This would include our preferred set of values, goals and guiding principles, which will enable them to learn from experience and cope with reality, he adds. Ultimately, we may launch our AI systems for interstellar travel towards distant destinations, such as habitable planets around other stars, where they could reproduce themselves with the help of accompanying 3D printers.

The Search for Extraterrestrial AI Systems

If other technological civilizations predated us, they may have done so already, concludes Loeb. I recently initiated a new Galileo Project to search for such AI systems of extraterrestrial origin.

Theres currently an AI revolution, and we see artificial intelligence getting smarter and smarter by the day, Susan Schneider, an associate professor of cognitive science and philosophy at the University of Connecticut who has written about the intersection of SETI and AI, says. That suggests to me something similar may be going on at other points in the universe. Once a society creates the technology that could put them in touch with the cosmos, they are only a few hundred years away from changing their own paradigm from biology to AI.

Earth is actually a relatively young planet so some astrobiologists think if there are civilizations out there, they may be vastly more advanced than us.

Moores Law Intelligent Machines Trump Darwin

Sure, we got radio. Then we got computers. Then Moores Law turned digital computers into increasingly efficient machines, year-by-year. Machines improved very quicklymuch, much more quickly than Darwin. By 1900 you had radio; by 1945 you had computers, Seth Shostak, senior scientist at the SETI Institute, says. It seems to me thats a hard arc to avoid.

In her writings on AI and SETI, Schneider says, I pushed for agnosticism about machine consciousness. We just dont have any clue if consciousness could be non-biological.

But non-biological components could be added to conscious beings. Im actually concerned that technological civilizations may not last long, but if they do, theres a lot of reasons to believe theyll be post-biological, Schneider says. Theyll enhance their brains towards synthetic intelligence.

But, Shostak points out, planets are volatile, prone to eruptions and earthquakes and the effects of an aging star. Machines arent necessarily going to stay on a planet, he says. Planets are dangerous for machines.

While the definitions of the Singularity are as varied as peoples fantasies of the future, with a very obvious reason, most agree that artificial intelligence will be the turning point. Once an AI is even the tiniest bit smarter than us, itll be able to learn faster and well simply never be able to keep up. This will render us utterly obsolete in evolutionary terms, or at least in evolutionary terms.

Schneider is one of the few thinkersoutside the realm of science fiction that have considered the notion that artificial intelligence is already out there, and has been for eons.

Artificial intelligence is already out there, and has been for eons

In her study, Alien Minds, Schneider asks: how might aliens think? And, would they be conscious? I do not believe that most advanced alien civilizations will be biological, Schneider says. The most sophisticated civilizations will be postbiological, forms of artificial intelligence or Alien superintelligence.

I try to keep a very open mind about what were looking for. When SETI succeeds it wont be like science fiction where we find something like us, Jason Wright, an associate professor at Penn State, says.

A more accurate extrapolation of our future would note that Homo sapiens is in the throes of inventing our successors, observes Shostak in an email to The Daily Galaxy.You can spend a lot of money on a computer that can beat any human at such tasks as playing chess or poker. But by mid-century, well have generalized AI a computer that can outwit humans at any cognitive task, continues Shostak. And the first thing youd do is ask that machine to invent a better version of itself. By 2100 (actually, probably sooner) well have machines that have IQs greater than all humanity in total. Its a bit unclear what this means for humans, but if you talk to the AI types around here (Silicon Valley), they dont seem to doubt that by mid-century well have machines capable of writing the great American novel.

Advanced Aliens as Sythetic Intelligence

This trajectory, making smart machines in the same millennium we have made big strides in science and technology, is probably a general one, continues Shostak. And the obvious conclusion is that the really advanced aliens elsewhere in the cosmos are also synthetic intelligence.

The implications for SETI are manifold. Machines may be derived from organic intelligence, but once they exist theyre no longer restricted to a world with liquids and atmosphere, concludes Shostak. Wherever they can harvest energy (and a bit of matter) is just fine as a habitat. Our search for signs of cosmic company tends to focus on star systems that might harbor planetary cousins of Earth. But the majority of extraterrestrial intelligence is not likely to be situated there. This requires, as you can imagine, some other types of searching.

While we are aware that our culture is anthropomorphizing, Schneider imagines that her suggestion that aliens are supercomputers may strike us as far-fetched. So what is her rationale for the view that most intelligent alien civilizations will have members that are superintelligent AI?

Schneider presents offer two observations that support her conclusion for the existence of alien superintelligence.

The first is the short window observation: Once a society creates the technology that could put them in touch with the cosmos, they are only a few hundred years away from changing their own paradigm from biology to AI. This short window makes it more likely that the aliens we encounter would be postbiological.

The short window observation is supported by human cultural evolution, at least thus far. Our first radio signals date back only about a hundred and twenty years, and space exploration is only about fifty years old, but we are already immersed in digital technology, such as cell-phones and laptop computers.

Superintelligence

Schneiders second argument is the greater age of alien civilizations. Proponents of SETI have often concluded that alien civilizations would be much older than our own all lines of evidence converge on the conclusion that the maximum age of extraterrestrial intelligence would be billions of years, specifically [it] ranges from 1.7 billion to 8 billion years.

If civilizations are millions or billions of years older than us, many would be vastly more intelligent than we are. By our standards, many would be superintelligent. We are galactic babies.

But would they be forms of AI, as well as forms of superintelligence? asks Schneider. Even if they were biological, merely having biological brain enhancements, their superintelligence would be reached by artificial means, and we could regard them as being artificial intelligence. But I suspect something stronger than this: I expect that they will not be carbon-based. Uploading allows a creature near immortality, enables reboots, and allows it to survive under a variety of conditions that carbon-based life forms cannot. In addition, silicon appears to be a better medium for information processing than the brain itself.

Neurons reach a peak speed of about 200 Hz, which is orders of magnitude slower than current microprocessors. While the brain can compensate for some of this with massive parallelism, features such as hubs, and so on, crucial mental capacities, such as attention, rely upon serial processing, which is incredibly slow, and has a maximum capacity of about seven manageable chunks.

Further, the number of neurons in a human brain is limited by cranial volume and metabolism, but computers can occupy entire buildings or cities, and can even be remotely connected across the globe. Of course, the human brain is far more intelligent than any modern computer. But intelligent machines can in principle be constructed by reverse engineering the brain, and improving upon its algorithms.

The Daily Galaxy via Avi Loeb, Seth Shostak, and Susan Schneider Alien Minds PDF and SETI Institute

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Something Similar to the AI Revolution May Have Happened at Other Points in the Universe - The Daily Galaxy --Great Discoveries Channel