So, personally I’m a big fan of aliens. They are intelligent, they are bipedal, they are talking (growl and stuff), they have guns, and they hunt. There are some deviations tho, some of them are smart slimes, some are smart nanobots, some are smart lights and orbs and things like that. You see, we were curious enough to exhaust the possibilities. Our inspirations were mostly deep ocean creatures and insects and some other sticky wet stuff. Yet, they usually had something in common from the lights to giant octopuses they were intelligent. It makes sense though, you need to be intelligent to make a spaceship and travel across galaxies right? We, almighty humans, still lack this so whoever flies that UFO must be more intelligent than us even though they sometimes behave like animals by just trying to spread their eggs around and feed on our fleshes. Anyway, in this blog post, I want to bring some arguments in favour of aliens who have no clue what they are doing because they have no intelligence as we usually see in movies but they can wipe us all out in a snap.
No Intelligence? No Problem.
Let’s jump straight into it. We already know a really stupid thing with literally no signs of intelligence that is beating our asses pretty well. Bacteria. Yeah, there’s a war against bacteria and these tiny freaks are winning because we, ironically the intelligent side, are too messy to handle the battlefield properly. We make antibacterial substances but then they evolve and become resistant so we gotta make different/stronger ones and they become stronger as the result of our antibacterial addiction and the cycle repeats. What they are beating us at is coordination. They just don’t need it and we need to unite as the human race, which we are terrible at even as a football team.
Another example comes from the creepy realm of parasites. There are some weirdly simple parasites that have uncannily smart strategies to survive and reproduce and I’ll give you one of them called Toxoplasma Gondii. This thing is basically a single-cell parasite with cats’ bodies being its paradise to reproduce. As a result, cats’ poops get contaminated with their eggs that might somehow end up in you (don’t eat cat poops please). This will cause Toxoplasmosis, which we don’t care about here but what we care about is the way T.Gondii can change us as it’s sitting around some of your brain tissues. There were studies that found links between being an intermediate host of this dude with psychological disorders such as depression and schizophrenia. You are their intermediate host because at the end they’d like to go back to a cat to have their simple lives joyful. By itself, this sounds like any other weird thing that can alter our minds, like we have a fever and start hallucinating that's not creepy yet. It’s because we are not their true target, rodents are. So when a mouse gets infected it won’t become schizophrenic but it goes through a set of complicated behavioural changes that makes him stupidly brave with respect to just cats. Right, so our T.Godnii (it’s a cool rap name btw) goes straight back to the cat again. What just happened here? let me repeat myself: A single-cell parasite manipulates the brain of its intermediate host, a mouse, tells it not to avoid cats, they’re cute, let’s go pet them or whatever, so it can go to the environment it loves.
how parasites change host behaviour
If this is not smart for you check this fungus now. Yes it’s a goddamn fungus that likes to grow inside ants so when it’s there it messes with the ant’s brain so the ant crawls all the way up to a perfectly positioned leaf above its own colony, bites the leaf and stays there till it dies then the fungus grows and spreads its pores on the colony of ants underneath. I think you got where I’m heading at: Aliens might not wipe us with lasers but with their viral tiny viruses or whatever (assuming they themselves are not these viruses).
Is It Plausible Though?
Oh well if grey acid spitter reptiles with laser guns are then why not these? I mean let’s check the grand design of the universe. There are billions of stars and tons of them are suitable to have some kind of life form evolving on them. But, we have no idea how their planet’s ecological factors shaped their organisms so let’s come back to earth now as an analogy. Here we have intelligent humans for about 10.000 years but we had single-cell organisms from millions of years ago so the sparking point is more probable but reaching this kind of intelligence is not at all.
Then we have all the animal kingdom that are presumably not intelligent enough to make guns and attack us the kings so intermediate points are not enough either. What we’re dealing with is either a seriously simple organism that is programmed to reproduce and not die, going around by accident and spreading in a blink or a sophisticated cognitive übermachine that is capable of making rockets to actually go to another planet and do stuff. To me, it’s actually not only plausible but probable to get invaded by the bacterial like aliens instead of E.T like ones first coming in peace then somehow realizing we don’t deserve it. Even here on earth, we have plenty of such unintelligent aliens that are the true masters of the earth (go ahead, try wiping them out) but there’s only one Elon Musk sending his car to space. So, you calculate the odds for yourself.
A Lesson for A.I
There was a point here on intelligence. What is it? We immediately go through the history of measuring intelligence and all those psychological definitions that anthropomorphises the notion of intelligence. Stephen Hawking (probably not though but that’s not for us to debunk) pointed towards an interesting direction saying:
Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change
But I personally think this definition is missing a crucial point on change because what do we mean by change? of course, those parasites will certainly face major problems if the host’s body changes chemically or something. But aren’t they showing a goal-directed intelligent-like behaviour by making their hosts their puppets? Isn’t this exactly what Ava did in Ex-Machina? Isn’t this even conceptually one step further than the famous Turing test? So what are we dealing with here intelligence or not? I think it is and I think the lesson for AI developers here is that maybe we gotta focus more on the “environmental demands and restrains” instead of the AI’s architecture. Of course, a fungus isn’t playing Go but hey, Deep RL also doesn't do what the fungus is doing so… Yeah, maybe we gotta design some biologically-inspired environments instead and let agents live there for some time and see what comes up from that.
P.s: Take a look at these if you’re also fascinated by mind-controlling parasites:
