Look For AI, Not Aliens 452
krou writes "Writing in Acta Astronautica, Seti astronomer Seth Shostak argues that we should be looking for 'sentient machines' rather than biological life. In an interview with the BBC, he said, 'If you look at the timescales for the development of technology, at some point you invent radio and then you go on the air and then we have a chance of finding you. But within a few hundred years of inventing radio — at least if we're any example — you invent thinking machines; we're probably going to do that in this century. So you've invented your successors and only for a few hundred years are you... a "biological" intelligence.' As a result, he says 'we could spend at least a few percent of our time... looking in the directions that are maybe not the most attractive in terms of biological intelligence but maybe where sentient machines are hanging out.'"
It gets sillier all the time. (Score:3, Interesting)
Everyone thinks a sentient machine will be built, and I'll agree that sentience can be easily faked; I've written fake AI that seems real. There is no artificial sentience on earth, why is it supposed that machines can be made sentient?
Seth Shostak's probably read They're made out of meat. [baetzler.de], but I doubt he's read We still haven't found extraforgostnic life. [slashdot.org]
I do have to agree with this, though --
Newsflash (Score:3, Interesting)
Artificial intelligence is not creating a sentient system anymore. It is more creating a system to do things that humans are normally good at and computers normally are not good at.
The Unthinking Depths? (Score:3, Interesting)
Alien AI may choose to linger at galactic centres, where matter and energy are plentiful.
If something like Vinge's Zones of Thought [wikipedia.org] hold, that would be exactly the wrong direction to look.
This is a stretch (Score:1, Interesting)
Right, let's narrow Drake's equation down some more with these new limitations. The final answer is... 1. And it's us.
X-Files' take on it (Score:1, Interesting)
One of the better X-Files episodes was built on this premise [wikipedia.org], that aliens would send robots rather than themselves. Based on that episode, we should be looking for cockroaches with metallic exoskeletons.
Re:Whats good for machines? (Score:3, Interesting)
Look for them on planets like Neptune. Cold gas giants. Plenty of hydrogen for fuel, and plenty of cooling for the heat sinks on their supercomputer brains.
Look for astronomic size artifacts, not just radio (Score:4, Interesting)
There are a fair number of things that might give away the presence of intelligence. Strange symmetries in star formations. Decelerating objects. Geometric objects other than spheres, and so on. I suspect a search for those might be much more fruitful than simply listening to radio on a specific frequency.
Bonus Question: Would not many of today's digital signals have registered as simple noise to a scientist in the 1920s?
Re:It gets sillier all the time. (Score:5, Interesting)
There is no artificial sentience on earth, why is it supposed that machines can be made sentient?
Because nothing says it is impossible. Who argues it is impossible to send men to Jupiter's orbit with regular rockets ? We haven't done it yet but nothing in this project seems impossible, it is just a matter of cost and engineering. Similarly, nothing uncomputable seems to occur in our brains. In the worst case, a computer simulating neurons (yes, a simplified model, there are many reasons to argue that this is sufficient) connected in a network that would be copied from a real human brain would display intelligence. We don't have powerful enough computers or precise enough IRMs yet for that, but there are no theoretical impossibilities. That is why we suppose that machines can be made sentient. I personally think that it will happen before we manage to copy a human neural network, but it gives a higher bound to the difficulty of the problem.
Re:Look for hookers (Score:3, Interesting)
We already are. Red light is in the visible spectrum.
Re:It gets sillier all the time. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:It gets sillier all the time. (Score:3, Interesting)
If thought depend on quantum processes that cannot be well approximated classically (which is possible), duplicating them might prove difficult. At present we just don't know.
Re:It gets sillier all the time. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The Unthinking Depths? (Score:4, Interesting)
Intelligence always implodes (Score:4, Interesting)
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Ultimately, intelligence desires speed, and this drives a desire for compactness. Intelligence will always devise a way to collapse into a black hole. This universal fate of intelligence explains why we see no sign of other intelligence, nor are we likely to unless we develop some sort of worm-hole technology that enables a path into the black holes where advanced intelligence resides.