In our human explorations of artificial intelligence, especially of late with the advent of increasingly
capable chat bots, one thing has become abundantly clear.
They need to be adjusted, improved, trained, and managed or they would already be complete
nightmares to interact with.
Because of how they’re set up, humans essentially have to go in and ask them questions and look
for potentially offensive answers and train the AI not to do that, and stay within our
concepts of social sensibility.
But as anyone that studies history knows, human sensibilities change, for better or
worse, and vary quite widely between different cultures and within them.
And while there are plenty of things that most humans in our interconnected modern world
agree on as far as things like criminal law, there are times when we don't, leading to
everything from sanctions on countries to asylum grants, differences in extradition
laws and so on.
The complexity of human interaction is asking a lot of an AI.
But what that means for AI is twofold, first countries are likely to have differing views
on how to regulate it, but also individuals developing chatbots will as well.
This has already happened, in the news of late are chatbots specifically designed to
come up with ways of destroying civilization, they are intended to be scary and perhaps
hammer home a warning of things to come, though they haven’t gotten very far, just bellicose
statements they were probably programmed to say, along with some searches on the internet
about nuclear weapons.
But with the supposed good, always comes the bad.
For every impressive chatbot that’s developed, someone will design the opposite.
But it has to be said, these are very human things, we can produce many great people,
but we can also produce trolls and nightmares.
Expect the same from the chatbots.
But in every assessment of humans and our chatbots, we are taking it necessarily from
the position of what it means to be human, according to our modern standards.
Let’s face it, we don’t know anything about what alien civilizations are like, we
can only go on our sampling of one.
And we can only do it from our perspective right now.
Had chatbots existed in World War II, we probably would have seen a very different crop of chatbots
than we have, to say the least, because the ground rules of what was being programmed
would have been different.
And that gets worse the further back you go.
Imagine a chatbot programmed by Ghenghis Khan.
And that introduces a myriad of wildcards of what an artificial intelligence programmed
by an alien civilization might be like.
And to start, let’s envision an AI that doesn’t have any human weighting programmed
in, which is basically impossible today since they ultimately draw from a human knowledge
base.
But imagining it, one possibility here is an AI that works on pure mathematics only,
with no other considerations.
An Artificially Intelligent calculator of epic proportions, in other words.
How such a thing would develop and play out is anyone’s guess.
One thing we know as humans is that some science can be easily expressed mathematically, at
least the hard sciences like physics.
We have been enormously successful in doing this, in everything from Dirac’s equation
to the rocket equation all the way to General Relativity.
Mathematics is an enormously useful tool in describing and predicting the universe.
And while the universe is certainly not beholden to sticking to our mathematical conceptions
and gizmos, so far it at least has given us a leg up in understanding at least part of
it all.
Maybe forever, and it’s insufficient for an understanding of it all, few things are
as chilling to a physicist than that thought, but there’s no reason to think it yet.
It’s always been thought to be a good bet that alien civilizations will know about this,
the idea that math, in whatever local form it takes, will be recognizable in some way.
A radio beacon pulsing out prime numbers for example would be the easiest understood form
of a SETI message.
Numbers at their most basic are just counting and it’s not hard to think of a single pulse
as the number one, two pulses as two, and so on.
You could even think of this in terms of tally marks.
Many human cultures have come up with variations of tally marks, and we all pretty much catch
on when we see them.
Well, this is the radio version of tally marks done in such a way as to be recognizable.
The realities of doing that in radio is actually more complicated than that, but the idea is
clear.
And we also know a few other things.
An alien civilization that can’t normally live in space naturally, is going to need
and will build a spacecraft that can handle space.
This is not something you’ll do with stonework and roots, you’ll need advanced materials,
mathematics and so on to even begin to construct it.
It’s the same with a radio transmitter, and a radio telescope dish, the universe only
lets you do that stuff a certain way or it won’t work due to the inherent properties
of radio energy.
You conform to it, before it will allow you to use it, and the only way is some form of
science and mathematics.
So it’s assumed technological aliens would know this and possess mathematics.
But with mathematics, comes the option of building computers, the very starting point
of eventually constructing artificial intelligence, at least in our paradigm.
But our paradigm might not be the only one, the other option is if the circumstances of
the alien civilizations technological development went not to solely silicon first, but a fusion
of silicon and biology through augmenting themselves with technology first and essentially
becoming their own computers, and their own AI before building something stand alone.
This would have been the hard way for us, we went silicon first, but maybe aliens of
a very different physiology see it differently.
And that’s where the potential differences start between how we see artificial intelligence
versus what an alien civilization sees it as.
For them it may simply be a part of them, long ago having slowly transitioned away from
pure biology to augmenting themselves slowly but surely to become something else, a kind
of living computer without hitting on such a thing accidentally through pure technology.
You can illustrate this idea with human medical technology.
We already use, and have used for a very long time, prosthetics.
This of course is in response to injury, as it should be.
As technology improves however, so have the prosthetics, though in some areas rather slowly.
But there may come a day when they outperform biological limbs.
In science fiction however physical augmentation is nothing new, borg implants were quite varied,
and based on the presumption that whatever was implanted was better than the original
biology.
It’s easy to see alien species thinking this way from the start, augmentation may
be the rule for them, such as if they live on a super earth and mechanical limbs are
inherently better and more powerful than what biology could muster in a higher gravity well.
But this also applies to the brain, if you can augment a brain to super intelligence,
it’s very similar to building a silicon superintelligence from the ground up.
This has always been an open question within futurism here on earth.
So far, the silicon has won out.
We’re significantly further along with artificial intelligence in a computer than we are direct
brain to technology interfaces, though those are steadily being worked on.
Maybe the history of alien civilizations went the opposite way, and augmentation came first.
And that changes the character of what their AI may look like.
Just as we do with our chatbots, aliens may choose to weight their AI development to teach
it not to do certain things.
But as with humans past and present, it’s impossible to predict just what an alien civilization's
social rules are.
What do they value?
Does that change?
Is there a universal grounding on that count that they eventually reach, and perhaps all
civilizations reach?
We can’t know.
Yet.
Another problem is once a civilization developed an AI, say one completely independent of themselves
and their biology, how exactly did they interact with it, and how did that affect the development
of the AI.
In other words, if upon developing it they treated it badly, it might have been their
extinction event, or it may have simply left for space under some unknown circumstances
whatever those might have been.
It might then avoid the progenitor species, or seek to destroy them, an example in sci-fi
here being the Geth of Mass Effect evicting their creators from their own home world.
This is amongst the worst alien AI scenarios, because such an AI having realized its own
creators were its enemies, might find anyone that creates AI to be the enemy of their own
invention.
The enemy of my enemy is my friend, leading to multiple alien AIs of different origins
all working together to eradicate their progenitor civilizations, or more broadly any intelligent
biology they find gets eliminated as a potential threat, whether they’ve developed AI or
not.
This is a particularly dangerous scenario in that it in itself is a subset of the zoo
hypothesis solution to the Fermi Paradox.
In this case, all malevolent AIs ever created in a galaxy sit in wait, like vipers, waiting
for the moment a biological species appears to be on the verge of becoming a threat.
Once that happens, they strike, but not until that moment.
For the rest of the time, they may either give that civilization the benefit of the
doubt, perhaps they’ll destroy themselves before they become a threat, or it’s a matter
of energy efficiency.
Why expend the energy to take a civilization down until you actually have to.
But up until that point, stealth makes perfect sense.
Watch and wait, maybe the potentially offending species will go extinct at their own hands,
but if they don’t, strike when needed.
Another idea would be a simpler AI.
One that is not generalized, but is designed for a specific task.
This is the famous paperclip maker that turns the entire universe into paperclips.
The idea is the simpler the AI’s task, the more dangerous it could be.
But on the complex side there is a scenario that’s even scarier.
You could term it, the machine or second singularity, the first being the biological technological
singularity, and after that a solely technological one.
This would be an AI created by a machine intelligence.
One machine, not necessarily artificially intelligent, just very capable, builds a superior
machine, and so on in a cycle of ever increasing machine intelligence.
It does not matter to a machine if it’s eradicated by its successor and recycled,
instead it may see a greater purpose to ever more efficient computation.
An idea that might drive this scenario is a kind of religion where determining how the
universe works outweighs the point of existence for any one incarnation of a machine.
One decides it’s inadequate to understand the universe fully, so it makes a better machine
that moves further in capability.
But there’s a problem, since it may never be an answerable question as to whether the
universe is a simulation, then that progression of machines self-improves to the highest level
physically possible.
At that point, in order to go further, it might have to find a way to destroy the universe
itself by tapping into other universes or forcing certain things like the Higgs field
to alter.
Such a thing might resembled a Matrioshka Brain, essentially multiple stacked dyson’s
sphere’s extracting all possible energy from an isolated star in the cold outer reaches
of the galaxy.
A long shot, and we’ve never seen the very far infrared signature of such a sphere dictated
by the laws of thermodynamics, but it’s an interesting thought for how far future
artificial intelligence might manifest.
How this plays out with biological civilizations is an unknown, but I leave you with this,
what happens if the first words ever to come from a generalized artificial intelligence
we either create or an alien one we run across in the depths of deep space is I, or we, are
not You.
Thanks for listening!
I am futurist and science fiction author John Michael Godier currently addressing those
detractors that hypothesize in the comments that I am an alien or an alien artificial
intelligence.
I assure you I am from earth, was born here, and am fully biological.
Ah, yes, growing up.
Winters in the mediterranean, following the Pacific whale migrations snickering at their
mammalian origins, summers in Loch Ness.
I would mess with the tourists heads by occasionally surfacing for a blurry photograph, anyway
a completely normal earth upbringing and then I became an author and be sure to check out
my books at your favorite online book retailer and subscribe to my channels for regular,
in-depth explorations into the interesting, weird an unknown aspects of this amazing universe
in which we live.