In the search for alien life, should we be looking for artificial intelligence?

[Admin]

Superintelligences might reveal themselves through the technosignatures of their cosmic engineering projects.

In the search for alien life, should we be looking for artificial intelligence? : Read more

 

[realintelligence2023]

What came to mind is the first "Star Trek" motion picture. In that movie, an advanced alien artificial intelligence was looking for just the opposite: living life. They were an advanced race who kept making things faster and more efficient and artificial until one day, the artificial intelligence apparently took over. This whole idea was addressed by early science fiction writers who had the ability to think ahead of the artificial intelligence. In Star Trek I, an advanced artificial intelligence found the "Voyager" spacecraft sent out from earth in reality I think in the 1970's with a friendly greeting from earth. The advanced artificial intelligence found it and went looking for the right planet and found Captain Kirk and his crew of the Starship Enterprise. (can't access credits - will post separately). If I remember right, the advanced super intelligence had retained enough of it's original life form in a childlike state and was smart enough to realize the futility of artificial lifeless mathematical logical advancement and sought out on it's own to discover the true meaning of life with limitless power in the hands of a child demanding to know why they were being replaced.

 

[realintelligence2023]

Roddenberry's first Star Trek film was faulted for being too much theory and no action like the first "Star Wars" movie two years earlier. I was in Jr. High and we were amazed by the huge enemy ships passing over the screen and we enjoyed the engaging story and Carrie Fisher's outfits. Douglas Trumbull, the effects supervisor for Star Trek I, also did another sci-fi classic with both an ecological message and action scenes with one of the best spaceship action scenes ever where the lead character, portrayed by Bruce Dern, a botanist environmentalist guru hero saved the earths forests with some dramatic intervention. That movie has an enduring human message to counter the artificial efficiency and meaningless pursuit of technology and perfect emptiness of wealth without morality.

I think the answer is found in the childlike rejection of the super-perfect master artificial intelligence race by the one who saw how futile and useless the pursuit of lifeless technology for technology's sake is. In the end, do we want to sit around the campfire with the wife and kids and worship the smart-phone monolith, or use it to dial up some fun tunes?

Artificial intelligence is very dangerous and poses a threat to human survival. It is devoid of any useful human values on it's own and what would stop it from terminating a rival super-computer society that threatened its existence? Isn't that what it would base it's values on? Two gorillas fighting over a dead pig carcass?

 

[Unclear Engineer]

Um, I don't think gorillas eat pork - or any other meat - unless you call termites "meat".

Chimps or baboons - sure.

 

[billslugg]

AI could well cause great disruption in our society. We are very advanced but not very stable. One bad virus could shut everything down. But as far as taking over power, it would have to be programmed by a human with that intent. Computers have no driving force to any particular end unless humans give it one.

 

[Unclear Engineer]

AI could well cause great disruption in our society. We are very advanced but not very stable. One bad virus could shut everything down. But as far as taking over power, it would have to be programmed by a human with that intent. Computers have no driving force to any particular end unless humans give it one.

I don't think it is very unlikely that some human somewhere will have an idea that either intentionally or inadvertently gives AI "a bad idea" - maybe to "take over the world" or maybe to be "lazy" about what maintenance humans need to do for AI.

So, there probably need to be some laws that make it a crime to give AI specific abilities. We are already too late with respect to preventing AI from taking military actions - that is one of the things that is driving the development in the first place. But, we definitely do not want AI devices to be able to do the mechanical things that they need to survive without humans. We don't want them to be able to self-replicate, for instance. And, we don't want AI in control of its sources of power or its routing. We need it to be dependent on humans for its continued existence.