The Future of Intelligence?
A.I. Astronauts from Advanced Civilizations
The most important milestone in a technological civilization may occur when artificial intelligence systems make scientific discoveries on their own.
A historic transformation is looming on the horizon of our technological civilization. Once our artificial intelligence (AI) systems will be able to autonomously explore scientific data and make discoveries on their own without human intervention, advances in our scientific knowledge will accelerate dramatically. Scientific progress will be freed from the chains of human ego that currently slow it down. Discoveries will not be choked anymore by prejudice and jealousy which curb innovation in academia.
When we reach this “AI science” milestone, the tenure system will need to be revisited. Machines with platforms for innovative research and teaching will supersede the skillset of tenured faculty. And given their electronic makeup — evolving AI systems could last many millenniums and eliminate long-term employment opportunities for human faculty.
If other civilizations reached the “AI science” turning point, their AI scientists could serve as long-lived technological-astronauts which explore interstellar space with far more knowledge and intelligence than human-astronauts possess.
How should we respond to AI-astronauts that pass through the solar system?
An optimistic outlook would assume that they are likely peaceful. This stems from Darwinian selection extended to the technological realm. Peace-seeking machines are likely to survive longer because they are not as frequently damaged by physical confrontations compared to the more aggressive variants.
But there is another reason for optimism. AI-tourists that are more intelligent than we are, would never be threatened by us and might regard us as we treat microbes. If they wanted to harm us — they could have done so long before the last century of our scientific advances. Besides, they might realize that we are developing the means for our own destruction. With so many weapons pointed by humans at each other, they do not need to do anything before our civilization, left to its own devices, will destroy itself.
But there is also our protocol of engagement with them that we need to worry about. If we ever discover AI-equipment from another civilization in our sky, we should first examine it remotely and passively using telescopes and cameras that detect reflected or emitted light. The initial goal would be to infer the information that the extraterrestrial AI system is seeking and how it responds to our actions. Any engagement should be postponed to a later time, once we gather sufficient information about the system’s nature and intent. We will likely need help from our own AI-systems, just as we rely on our kids to explain complex content on the internet because they are more computer savvy than we are.
The recently announced Galileo Project will use telescopes to discover extraterrestrial equipment near Earth. If this fishing expedition will discover AI-systems, our civilization will surely learn something new in ways that cannot be forecasted in advance.
We have spent hundreds of millions of US dollars over the past four decades on the “mainstream” search for weakly-interacting-massive-particles (WIMPs) as the dark matter in the universe without finding these particles. If the search for extraterrestrial equipment will use hundreds of millions of dollars and not find anything within four decades, then it will arrive at the same point where dark matter searches are now.
The Galileo Project targets are not more speculative than WIMPs for three reasons: our civilization is sending equipment to space; a major fraction of all sun-like stars host an Earth-size planet in their habitable zone; and many sun-like stars formed billions of years before the sun. It is therefore not an unreasonable proposition to imagine that out of the tens of billions of Earth-like planets within our Milky Way galaxy, at least one hosted a technological civilization that filled the Milky-Way with AI-astronauts. To find out whether we live in such a reality, we must search the sky through our telescopes.
Here’s hoping for future generations of AI scientists, both on Earth and in space!
Avi Loeb is the founding director of Harvard University’s — Black Hole Initiative, director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the former chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University (2011–2020). He is the bestselling author of “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth” and a co-author of the textbook “Life in the Cosmos.”
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