Papers presented at an international symposium considering the true nature of extraterrestrial Intelligence.
Introduction: The True Nature of Aliens
Is it time to re-think ET?
For well over a half-century, a small number of scientists have conducted searches for artificially produced signals that would indicate the presence of intelligence elsewhere in the cosmos. This effort, known as SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), has yet to find any confirmed radio transmissions or pulsing lasers from other beings. But the hunt continues, recently buoyed by the discovery of thousands of exoplanets. For many, the abundance of habitable real estate makes it difficult to believe that Earth is the only world where life and intelligence have arisen.
SETI practitioners mostly busy themselves with refining their equipment and their lists of target solar systems. They seldom consider the nature of their prey – what form extraterrestrial intelligence might take. Their premise is that any technically sophisticated species will eventually develop signaling technology, irrespective of their biology or physiognomy.
This view may not seem anthropocentric, for it makes no overt assumptions about the biochemistry of extraterrestrials; only that intelligence will arise on at least some worlds with life. However, the trajectory of our own technology now suggests that within a century or two of our development of radio transmitters and lasers, we are likely to build machines with artificial, generalized intelligence. We are engineering our successors, and the next intelligent species on Earth is not only certain to dwarf our own cognitive abilities, but will be able to engineer its own, superior descendants by design, rather than counting on uncertain, Darwinian processes. Assuming that something similar happens to other technological societies, then the implications for SETI are profound.
In September, 2015, the John Templeton Foundation’s Humble Approach Initiative sponsored a three-day symposium entitled “Exploring Exoplanets: The Search for Extraterrestrial Life and Post-Biological Intelligence.” The venue for the meeting was the Royal Society’s Chicheley Hall, north of London, where a dozen researchers gave informal presentations and engaged in the type of lively dinner table conversations that such meetings inevitably spawn.
The subject matter was broad, ranging from the multi-pronged search for habitable planets and how we might detect life, to the impact of both the search and an eventual discovery. However, the matter of post-biological intelligence – briefly described above – or the possibility of non-Darwinian evolutionary processes, was an incentive for many of the symposium contributions.
We present here short write-ups of seven of these talks. They are more than simply interesting: they suggest a revolution in how we should think about, and search for, our intellectual peers. Indeed, they suggest that “peers” may be too generous to Homo sapiens. As these essays argue, the majority of the cognitive capability in the cosmos may be far beyond our own.
-- Seth Shostak
This symposium was chaired by Martin J. Rees, OM, Kt, FRS and Paul C.W. Davies, AM, and organized by Mary Ann Meyers, JTF’s Senior Fellow. Also present was B. Ashley Zauderer, Assistant Director of Math and Physical Sciences at the Templeton Foundation
POST-HUMAN EVOLUTION ON EARTH AND BEYOND
Martin J Rees
Institute of Astronomy
Madingley Road
Cambridge CB3 OHA
mjr@ast.cam.ac.uk
ABSTRACT
The pace of technological advance on Earth is such that post-humans – whether organic, cyborg or entirely inorganic – could emerge within a few centuries (or indeed within a single century). In the billions of years lying ahead, such entities, continuing to evolve not through natural selection but on the (far faster) timescale of technological evolution could spread through the cosmos (in a manner whose details we manifestly cannot even conceive) . If advanced life had emerged on other planets, and followed a similar evolutionary track to what has happened on Earth, then the era of ‘organic’ intelligence will be a thin sliver of time compared to the far longer post-human era dominated by ‘machines’. This suggests that, if SETI succeeded, the most likely source of any artificial emissions would be unlikely to come from anything resembling the ‘organic’ civilization that prevails on Earth.
Extraterrestrial life and intelligence have always been fascinating topics on the speculative fringe of science. But in the last decade or two, serious advances on several fronts have generated wider interest in these subjects – indeed, they have become almost ‘mainstream’. One can highlight four areas where there’s a gratifying crescendo of interest and understanding:
(i) The discovery and study of exoplanets began only 20 years ago. It is now one of the most vibrant frontiers of science. Data are accumulating at an accelerating rate; we can confidently assert that there are billions of Earth-like planets in our Galaxy; it is not premature to seek evidence that some have biospheres
(ii) There has been substantial recent progress in understanding the origin of life. It’s been clear for decades that the transition from complex chemistry to the first entities that could be described as ‘living’ poses one of the crucial problems in the whole of science. But until recently, people shied away from it, regarding it as neither timely nor tractable. In contrast, numerous distinguished scientists are now committed to this challenge.
(iii) Advances in computational power and robotics have led to growing interest in the possibility that ‘artificial intelligence’ (AI) could in the coming decades achieve (and exceed) human capabilities over a wider range of conceptual and physical tasks. This has stimulated discussions of the nature of consciousness (is it an ‘emergent’ property or something more special?), and further speculation by ethicists and philosophers on what forms of inorganic intelligence might be created by us – or might already exist in the cosmos – and how humans might relate to them.
(iv) In the coming years there will be expanded and better-resourced efforts to search for ET; these will focus wider interest on the subject and thereby generate new ideas.
SOME HISTORY
Speculations on ‘the plurality of inhabited worlds’ date back to antiquity. From the 17th to the 19th century, it was widely suspected that the other planets of our Solar System were inhabited. The arguments were often more theological than scientific. Eminent 19th century thinkers like Whewell and Brewster argued that life must pervade the cosmos, because otherwise such vast domains of space would seem such a waste of the Creator’s efforts. An interesting and amusing critique of such ideas is given in books by Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-developer of natural selection theory. Wallace is specially scathing about the physicist David Brewster (remembered for the ‘Brewster angle’ in optics) who conjectured on such grounds that even the Moon must be inhabited [1]. Brewster argued that had the Moon “been destined to be merely a lamp to our Earth, there was no occasion to variegate its surface with lofty mountains and extinct volcanoes, and cover it with large patches of matter that reflect different quantities of light and give its surface the appearance of continents and seas. It would have been a better lamp had it been a smooth piece of lime or of chalk.”
By the end of the nineteenth century, so convinced were many astronomers that life existed on other planets in our Solar System that a prize of 100,000 francs was offered to the first person to make contact with them. And the prize specifically excluded contact with Martians – that was considered far too easy! The erroneous claim that Mars was crisscrossed by canals had been taken as proof positive of intelligent life on the Red Planet.
The space age brought sobering news. Venus, a cloudy planet that promised a lush tropical swamp-world, turned out to be a crushing, caustic hell-hole. Mercury was a pockmarked blistering rock. And NASA’s Curiosity probe (and its predecessors) showed that Mars, though the most Earth-like body in the Solar System, was actually a frigid desert with a very thin atmosphere. There may be creatures swimming under the ice of Jupiter’s moon Europa, or Saturn’s moon Enceladus, but nobody can be optimistic.
However, the prospects brighten enormously when we extend our gaze beyond our Solar System – beyond the reach of any probe we can devise today. What has transformed and energized the whole field of exobiology is the realization that stars are orbited by retinues of planets. Giordano Bruno speculated about this in the 16th century. From the 1940s onward, astronomers suspected he was correct: the earlier idea that our Solar system formed from a tidal stream torn out by the tidal pull of a close-passing star (which would have implied that planetary systems were rare) had by then been discredited. But it wasn’t until the mid-1990s that evidence for exoplanets started to emerge. Moreover, Bruno famously went further, and conjectured that on some of those planets there might be other creatures “as magnificent as those upon our human Earth.” Will he one day be proved right on this bolder speculation too?
ORIGIN OF LIFE
There seem good prospects for progress in understanding the origin of life. What triggered the transition from complex molecules to entities that can metabolize and reproduce? It might have involved a fluke so rare that it happened only once in the entire Galaxy. On the other hand, this crucial transition might have been almost inevitable given the ‘right’ environment. We just don’t know – nor do we know if the DNA/RNA chemistry of terrestrial life is the only possibility, or just one chemical basis among many options that could be realized elsewhere.
The origin of life is now attracting stronger interest: it’s no longer deemed to be one of those problems (consciousness, for instance, is still in this category) which, though manifestly important, doesn’t seem timely or tractable – and is relegated to the ‘too difficult box’. And of course the understanding of life’s beginnings is important not only for our assessment of the likelihood of alien life, but also to the most firmly earthbound evolutionary biologist.
And there is a second still more fascinating question (Bruno’s conjecture) : if simple life exists, what are the odds that it evolves into something that we would recognize as intelligent? Even if primitive life were common, the emergence of ‘advanced’ life may not be – it may depend on many contingencies (phases of glaciation, the Earth’s tectonic history, asteroid impacts, and so forth). Several authors have speculated about possible ‘bottlenecks’ – key stages in evolution that are hard to transit. Perhaps the transition to multi-cellular life is one of these. (The fact that simple life on Earth seems to have emerged quite quickly, whereas even the most basic multi-cellular organisms took nearly 3 billion years, suggests that there may be severe barriers to the emergence of any complex life.) Or the ‘bottleneck’ could come later.
Even in a complex biosphere, the emergence of intelligence isn’t guaranteed. If, for instance, the dinosaurs hadn’t been wiped out, the chain of mammalian evolution that led to humans might have been foreclosed and we can’t predict whether another species would have taken our role. Some evolutionists regard the emergence of intelligence as a contingency – even an unlikely one. The alternative view is represented by Simon Conway Morris (see his contribution to this workshop).
Perhaps, more ominously, there could be a ‘bottleneck’ at our own present evolutionary stage – the stage when intelligent life develops powerful technology. If so, the long-term prognosis for ‘Earth-sourced’ life depends on whether humans survive this critical evolutionary phase. This does not mean that the Earth has to avoid a disaster – only that, before it happens some humans or advanced artefacts have spread beyond their home planet.
In considering the possibilities of life elsewhere, we should surely be open-minded about where it might emerge and what forms it could take – and to devote some thought to non-earthlike life in non-earthlike locations. But it plainly makes sense to start with what we know (the ‘searching under the streetlamp’ strategy) and to deploy all available techniques to discover whether any exoplanet atmospheres display evidence for a biosphere. Clues will surely come in the next decade or two from high-resolution spectra using the James Webb Space Telescope and the next generation of 30+ meter ground-based telescopes expected to be operational in the 2020s. To optimize the prospects, we shall need beforehand to have scanned the whole sky to identify the nearest earthlike planets. Even for these, next-generation telescopes will have a hard job separating out the spectrum of the planet’s atmosphere from the spectrum of the hugely brighter central star.
Conjectures about advanced or intelligent life are of course far more shaky than those about simple life. But the firmest guesses that we can make are based on extrapolating the far future of Earth-based life. I would argue that this suggests two things about the entities that SETI searches could reveal.
(a) They will not be ‘organic’ or biological
(b) They will not remain on the planet where their biological precursors lived.
FAR FUTURE OF EARTH-SOURCED INTELLIGENCE
During this century, the entire Solar System – planets, moons and asteroids – will be explored by flotillas of tiny robotic craft. The next step would be the deployment of large-scale robotic fabricators, which can construct and assemble large structures in space (and fabrication in space will be a better use of materials mined from asteroids or the Moon than bringing them back to Earth). The Hubble Telescope’s successors, with huge gossamer-thin mirrors assembled under zero gravity, will further expand our vision of stars, galaxies and the wider cosmos.
But what role will humans play? There’s no denying that NASA’s Curiosity rover, now trundling across a giant Martian crater, may miss startling discoveries that no human geologist could overlook. But robotic techniques are advancing fast, allowing ever more sophisticated unmanned probes – and, later in the century, robotic fabricators will be building huge lightweight structures in space. The practical case for manned spaceflight gets ever-weaker with each advance in robotics and miniaturization. If some people now living one day walk on Mars (as I hope they will) it will be as an adventure, and as a step towards the stars.
The current cost gap between manned and unmanned missions is huge. Unless motivated by prestige and bankrolled by superpowers, manned missions beyond the Moon will perforce be cut-price ventures, accepting high risks – perhaps even ‘one-way tickets’. These missions will be privately funded; no Western government agency would expose civilians to such hazards. There would, despite the risks, be many volunteers – driven by the same motives as early explorers, mountaineers, and the like. But don’t ever expect mass emigration. No place in our Solar system offers an environment even as clement as the Antarctic or the top of Everest. Space doesn’t offer an escape from Earth’s problems.
Nonetheless, a century or two from now, there may be small groups of pioneers living independent from the Earth – on Mars or on asteroids. Whatever ethical constraints we impose here on the ground, we should surely wish these adventurers good luck in genetically modifying their progeny to adapt to alien environments. This might be the first step towards divergence into a new species: the beginning of the post-human era. And genetic modification would be supplemented by cyborg technology – indeed there may be a transition to fully inorganic intelligences.
(As a parenthetic comment, I’d note that the most crucial impediment to routine space flight, even in Earth’s orbit and still more for those venturing further, stems from the intrinsic inefficiency of chemical fuel, and the consequent requirement to carry a weight of fuel far exceeding that of the payload. So long as we are dependent on chemical fuels, interplanetary travel will remain a challenge. It’s interesting to note, incidentally, that this is a generic constraint, based on fundamental chemistry, on any organic intelligence that had evolved on another planet. If a planet’s gravity is strong enough to retain an atmosphere at a temperature where water doesn’t freeze and metabolic reactions aren’t too slow, the energy required to lift a molecule from it will require more than one molecule of chemical fuel).
Nuclear energy (or, more futuristically, matter/antimatter annihilation) could be a transformative fuel. But even then, the transit time beyond nearby stars exceeds a human lifetime. Interstellar travel (except for unmanned probes, DNA samples, etc.) is therefore an enterprise for post-humans. They could be silicon-based. Alternatively, they could be organic creatures who had won the battle with death, or perfected the techniques of hibernation or suspended animation.
Few doubt that machines will gradually surpass more and more of our distinctively human capabilities – or enhance them via cyborg technology. Disagreements are basically about the timescale – the rate of travel, not the direction of travel. The cautious amongst us envisage timescales of centuries rather than decades for these transformations. Be that as it may, the timescales for technological advance are but an instant compared to the timescales of the Darwinian selection that led to humanity’s emergence – and (more relevantly) they are less than a millionth of the vast expanses of cosmic time lying ahead. So the outcomes of future technological evolution will surpass humans by as much as we (intellectually) surpass a bug.
But we humans shouldn’t feel too humbled. Even though we are surely not the terminal branch of an evolutionary tree, we could be of special cosmic significance for jump-starting the transition to silicon-based (and potentially immortal) entities, spreading their influence far beyond the Earth, and far transcending our limitations.
Philosophers debate whether “consciousness” is special to the wet, organic brains of humans, apes and dogs. Might it be that robots, even if their intellects seem superhuman, will still lack self-awareness or inner life? The answer to this question crucially affects how we react to the far-future scenario I’ve sketched. If the machines are zombies, we would not accord them the same value as humans, and the post-human future would seem bleak. But if they are conscious, we should surely welcome the prospect of their future hegemony.
The far future will bear traces of humanity, just as our own age retains influences of ancient civilizations. Humans and all they have thought might be a transient precursor to the deeper cogitations of another culture — one dominated by machines, extending deep into the future and spreading far beyond Earth.
I think it’s likely that the machines will gain dominance on Earth – perhaps indeed before the stage when any self-sustaining human colony gets established away from our planet. This is because there are chemical and metabolic limits to the size and processing power of ‘wet’ organic brains. Maybe we’re close to these already. But no such limits constrain silicon based computers (still less, perhaps, quantum computers): for these, the potential for further development could be as dramatic as the evolution from monocellular organisms to humans. So, by any definition of ‘thinking’, the amount and intensity that’s done by organic human-type brains will be utterly swamped by the cerebrations of AI. Moreover, the Earth’s biosphere in which organic life has symbiotically evolved is not a constraint for advanced AI. Indeed it is far from optimal – interplanetary and interstellar space will be the preferred arena where robotic fabricators will have the grandest scope for construction, and where non-biological ‘brains’ may develop insights as far beyond our imaginings as string theory is for a mouse.
Abstract thinking by biological brains has underpinned the emergence of all culture and science. But this activity – spanning tens of millennia at most – will be a brief precursor to the more powerful intellects of the inorganic post-human era.
Human brains have changed little since our ancestors roamed the African savannah and coped with the challenges that life then presented. It’s surely remarkable that these brains have allowed us to make sense of the quantum and the cosmos – far removed from the ‘common sense’ everyday world in which we evolved. Nonetheless, some key features of reality may be beyond our conceptual grasp. Scientific frontiers are advancing fast. Answers to many current mysteries will surely come into focus. but we may at some point ‘hit the buffers’. Some insights may have to await post-human intelligence. There may be phenomena, crucial to our long-term destiny, that we are not aware of, any more than a monkey comprehends the nature of stars and galaxies. Some ‘brains’ may structure their consciousness in a fashion that we can’t conceive, and have a quite different perception of reality.
In cosmological terms (or indeed in a Darwinian timeframe) a millennium is but an instant. So let us ‘fast forward’ not even for a few millennia, but for an ‘astronomical’ timescale millions of times longer than that. The ‘ecology’ of stellar births and deaths in our Galaxy will proceed gradually more slowly, until jolted by the ‘environmental shock’ of an impact with Andromeda, maybe four billion years hence. The debris of our Galaxy, Andromeda and their smaller companions within the local group will thereafter aggregate into one amorphous galaxy. Distant galaxies will not only move further away, but recede faster and faster until they disappear – rather as objects falling onto a black hole encounter a horizon, beyond which they are lost from view and causal contact.
But the remnants of our Local Group could continue for far longer – time enough, perhaps for Kardashev Type III phenomenon to emerge as the culmination of the long-term trend for living systems to gain complexity and ‘negative entropy’. All the atoms that were once in stars and gas could be transformed into structures as intricate as a living organism or a silicon chip but on a cosmic scale.
But even these speculations don’t take us to the utter limits. I have assumed that the universe itself will expand, at a rate that no future entities have power to alter. And that everything is in principle understandable as a manifestation of the basic laws governing particles, space and time that have been disclosed by contemporary science. Some science fiction authors envisage stellar-scale engineering to create black holes and wormholes – concepts far beyond any technological capability that we can envisage, but not in violation of these basic physical laws. But are there new ‘laws’ awaiting discovery? And will the present ‘laws’ be immutable, even to a Type III intelligence able to draw on galactic-scale resources?
Post-human intelligences (autonomously-evolving artefacts) will achieve the processing power to simulate living things – even entire worlds. These super or hyper-computers would have the capacity to simulate not just a simple part of reality, but a large fraction of an entire universe.
And then of course the question arises: if these simulations exist in far larger numbers than the universe themselves, could we be in one of them? Could we ourselves not be part of what we think of as bedrock physical reality? Could we be ideas in the mind of some supreme being who is running a simulation? Indeed, if the simulations outnumber the universes, as they would if one universe contained many computers making many simulations, then the likelihood is that we are ‘artificial life’ in this sense. This concept opens up the possibility of a new kind of ‘virtual time travel’, because the advanced beings creating the simulation can, in effect, rerun the past. It’s not a time-loop in a traditional sense: it’s a reconstruction of the past, allowing advanced beings to explore their history.
These ideas would have the extraordinary consequence that we may not be part of the deepest reality: we may be a simulation. The possibility that we are creations of some supreme (or super) being, blurs the boundary between physics and idealist philosophy, between the natural and the supernatural. We may be in the matrix rather than directly manifesting the basic physical laws.
SETI: PROSPECTS AND TECHNIQUES
The scenarios I’ve just described would have the consequence – a boost to human self-esteem! – that even if life had originated only on the Earth, it would not remain a trivial feature of the cosmos: humans may be closer to the beginning than to the end of a process whereby ever more complex intelligence spreads through the Galaxy. But of course there would in that case be no ‘ET’ at the present time.
Suppose however that there are many other planets where life began; and suppose that on some of them Darwinian evolution followed a similar track. Even then, it’s highly unlikely that the key stages would be synchronized. If the emergence of intelligence and technology on a planet lags significantly behind what has happened on Earth (because the planet is younger, or because the ‘bottlenecks’ have taken longer to negotiate there than here) then that planet would plainly reveal no evidence of ET. But life on a planet around a star older than the Sun could have had a head-start of a billion years or more. Thus it may already have evolved much of the way along the futuristic scenarios outlined in the last section.
One generic feature of these scenarios is that ‘organic’ human-level intelligence is just a brief interlude before the machines take over. The history of human technological civilization is measured in millennia (at most) – and it may be only one or two more centuries before humans are overtaken or transcended by inorganic intelligence, which will then persist, continuing to evolve, for billions of years. This suggests that if we were to detect ET, it would be far more likely to be inorganic: we would be most unlikely to ‘catch’ alien intelligence in the brief sliver of time when it was still in organic form.
SETI searches are surely worthwhile, despite the heavy odds against success, because the stakes are so high. That’s why we should surely acclaim the launch of Breakthrough Listen – a major ten-year commitment by the Russian investor Yuri Milner to buy time on the world’s best radio telescopes and develop instruments to scan the sky in a more comprehensive and sustained fashion than ever before. Breakthrough Listen will carry out the world’s deepest and broadest search for extraterrestrial technological life using several of the world’s largest professional radio and optical telescopes. The project will deploy radio dishes at Green Bank and at Parkes – and hopefully others including the Arecibo Observatory. The radio telescopes will be used to search for non-natural radio transmissions from nearby and distant stars, from the plane of the Milky Way, from the Galactic Centre, and from nearby galaxies. They will search over a wide frequency bandwidth from 100 MHz to 50 GHz using advanced signal processing equipment developed by a team centered at UC Berkeley.
SETI searches seek some electromagnetic transmission that is manifestly artificial. But even if the search succeeded (and few of us would bet more than one percent on this), it would still in my view be unlikely that the ‘signal’ would be a decodable message. It would more likely represent a byproduct (or even a malfunction) of some super-complex machine far beyond our comprehension that could trace its lineage back to alien organic beings (which might still exist on their home planet, or might long ago have died out). The only type of intelligence whose messages we could decode would be the (perhaps small) subset that used a technology attuned to our own parochial concepts.
Even if intelligence were widespread in the cosmos, we may only ever recognize a small and atypical fraction of it. Some ‘brains’ may package reality in a fashion that we can’t conceive. Others could be living contemplative lives, perhaps deep under some planetary ocean, doing nothing to reveal their presence. It makes sense to focus searches first on Earth-like planets orbiting long-lived stars. But science fiction authors remind us that there are more exotic alternatives. In particular, the habit of referring to ET as an ‘alien civilization’ may be too restrictive. A ‘civilization’ connotes a society of individuals: in contrast, ET might be a single integrated intelligence. Even if signals were being transmitted, we may not recognize them as artificial because we may not know how to decode them. A radio engineer familiar only with amplitude-modulation might have a hard time decoding modern wireless communications. Indeed, compression techniques aim to make the signal as close to noise as possible – insofar as a signal is predictable, there’s scope for more compression.
Perhaps the Galaxy already teems with advanced life, and our descendants will ‘plug in’ to a galactic community – as rather junior members. On the other hand, Earth’s intricate biosphere may be unique and the searches may fail. This would disappoint the searchers. But it would have an upside. Humans could then be less cosmically modest. Our tiny planet – this pale blue dot floating in space – could be the most important place in the entire cosmos. Either way, our cosmic habitat seems ‘tuned’ to be an abode for life. Even if we are now alone in the universe, we may not be the culmination of this ‘drive’ towards complexity and consciousness.
The focus of the ‘Breakthrough Listen’ project is on the radio and optical parts of the spectrum. But of course, in our state of ignorance about what might be out there, we should clearly encourage searches in all wavebands (e.g. the X-ray band) and also be alert for artefacts and other evidence of non-natural phenomena. I don’t think even the optimistic SETI searchers would rate the chance of success as more than a few percent – and most of us are more pessimistic, but nevertheless think the stakes are so high that it’s worth a gamble – we’d surely all like to see searches begun in our lifetime.
Finally, there are two familiar maxims that pertain to this quest. First ‘extraordinary claims will require extraordinary evidence’ and second ‘absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence’.
REFERENCES
[1] Wallace, A. R 1903, Man’s Place in the Universe, Chapman and Hall (London) pp 15 – 19
-SUPERINTELLIGENT AI AND THE POSTBIOLOGICAL COSMOS APPROACH
Susan Schneider
Department of Philosophy and Cognitive Science Program, The University of Connecticut
Center for Theological Inquiry, Princeton
Technology and Ethics Group, Yale University
susansdr@gmail.com
ABSTRACT
The postbiological approach in astrobiology has been largely independent of the discussions of superintelligence in the AI literature, despite the increasing attention on superintelligent AI in both academe and in the media. In this paper, I bring these issues together. In my view, one route to understanding superintelligent alien civilizations, as well as superintelligence on Earth (should either ever exist) could involve identifying general features of computational systems, without which a superintelligence would be far less efficient. By drawing from Nick Bostrom’s work on superintelligent AI on Earth, as well as ideas from computational neuroscience, I will attempt to identify some goals and cognitive capacities likely to be possessed by superintelligent beings. I will then comment on some social implications of the postbiological approach
INTRODUCTION
Thinking about how aliens in other technological societies might think, if they exist at all, is obviously speculative, even for a philosopher. After all, exoplanets are habitable, we do not know if they are inhabited. We do not currently have an agreed-upon account of the origin of life on Earth, and we do not know how easy it is for life to originate elsewhere. And even if microbial life exists on many exoplanets, perhaps it is rare for microbial life to evolve into intelligent life. Or, perhaps it isn’t rare for intelligence to evolve, but civilizations do not survive their own technological maturity. Perhaps we are one of only a few technological civilizations in the universe, or perhaps we are alone.
But I am going to assume, optimistically, that advanced civilizations are out there. After all, if even one technological civilization exists, it is likely to be older than us, and it could have spread throughout the universe. Further, some proponents of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) estimate that we will encounter alien intelligence within the next several decades. Even if you hold a more conservative estimate – say, that the chance of encountering alien intelligence in the next 50 years is 5 percent – the stakes for our species are high. Knowing that we are not alone in the universe would be a profound realization, and contact with an alien civilization could produce amazing technological innovations and cultural insights. It thus can be valuable to consider these questions, albeit with the goal of introducing possible routes to answering them, rather than producing definitive answers. So, let us ask: how might aliens think? Believe it or not, it’s possible to say something concrete in response to this question.
We can approach this issue by drawing from science and the humanities, rather than just science In particular, I will draw from neuroscience, philosophy, astrobiology and artificial intelligence (AI). My point of departure is the intriguing position in astrobiology that the most intelligent alien civilizations may be postbiological, being synthetic superintelligences – creatures that are vastly smarter than humans in every respect, scientific reasoning, social skills, and more [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6].
The postbiological approach has been largely independent of the discussions of superintelligence, despite the increasing attention on superintelligent AI in both academe and in the media [7]. Herein, I bring these issues together, drawing from [4]. In my view, to understand the most intelligent alien civilizations, as well as superintelligence on Earth, we can look for general features of computational systems, without which a superintelligence would be far less efficient. So using work on superintelligent AI on Earth, as well as ideas from computational neuroscience, I will briefly and provisionally attempt to identify some goals and cognitive capacities likely to be possessed by superintelligent beings.
Section One overviews the postbiological cosmos approach. Section Two discusses Nick Bostrom’s recent book on superintelligence, which focuses on the genesis of superintelligent AI (“SAI”) on Earth; as it happens, many of Bostrom’s observations are informative in the present context. I then isolate a specific type of superintelligence that is of particular import in the context of alien superintelligence, biologically inspired superintelligences (“BISAs”). Section Three concludes by raising some issues for future reflection.
THE POSTBIOLOGICAL COSMOS APPROACH IN ASTROBIOLOGY
Our culture has long depicted aliens as humanoid creatures with small, pointy chins, massive eyes, and large heads, apparently to house brains that are larger than ours. Paradigmatically, they are “little green men.” While we are aware that our culture is anthropomorphizing, I imagine that my suggestion that aliens are supercomputers may strike you as far-fetched. So what is my rationale for the view that most intelligent alien civilizations will have members that possess SAI? I offer three observations that, together, motivate this conclusion.
(1) The short window observation. Once a society creates the technology that could put them in touch with the cosmos, they are only a few hundred years away from changing their own paradigm from biology to AI [3], [6], [2]. This “short window” makes it more likely that the aliens we encounter would be postbiological.
The short-window observation is supported by human cultural evolution, at least thus far. Our first radio signals date back only about 120 years, and space exploration is only about 50 years old, but we are already immersed in digital technology, such as cell-phones and laptop computers. It is probably a matter of less than 50 years before sophisticated internet connections are wired directly into our brains. Indeed, implants for Parkinson’s are already in use, and in the United States the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has started to develop neural implants that interface directly with the nervous system, regulating conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder, arthritis, depression, and Crohn’s disease. DARPA’s program, called “ElectRx,” aims to replace certain medications with “closed-loop” neural implants, implants that continually assess the state of one’s health, and provide the necessary nerve stimulation to keep one’s biological systems functioning properly [8]. Eventually, implants will be developed to enhance normal brain functioning, rather than for medical purposes.
You may object that this argument employs “N = 1 reasoning,” generalizing from the human case to the case of alien civilizations. But it strikes me as being unwise to discount arguments based on the human case. Human civilization is the only one we know of and we had better learn from it. It is no great leap to claim that other civilizations will develop technologies to advance their intelligence and survival. This is especially true if the alien civilizations evolved with similar evolutionary pressures as those on Earth. And, as I will explain in a moment, synthetic intelligence will likely outperform unenhanced brains.
A second objection to my short-window observation rightly points out that nothing I have said thus far suggests that humans will be superintelligent. I have merely said that future humans will be posthuman. While I offer support for the view that our own cultural evolution suggests that humans will eventually be postbiological, this does not show that advanced alien civilizations will reach superintelligence. So even if one is comfortable reasoning from the human case, the human case does not support the position that the members of advanced alien civilizations will be superintelligent.
This is a correct reading of my first observation. Whether or not they would be superintelligent is the addressed by the second.
(2) The greater age of alien civilizations. Proponents of SETI have often concluded that alien civilizations would be much older than our own: “… all lines of evidence converge on the conclusion that the maximum age of extraterrestrial intelligence would be billions of years, specifically [it] ranges from 1.7 billion to 8 billion years” ([2] p 468). If civilizations are millions or billions of years older than us, many would be vastly more intelligent than we are. By our standards, many would be superintelligent. We are galactic babies.
But would they be forms of AI, as well as forms of superintelligence? I believe so. Even if they were biological, merely having biological brain enhancements, their superintelligence would be reached by artificial means, and we could regard them as having forms of “artificial intelligence.” But I suspect something stronger than this, which leads me to my third observation:
(3) It is likely that these synthetic beings will not be biologically-based. Currently, silicon appears to be a better medium for information processing than the brain itself, and future materials may even prove superior to silicon. Neurons reach a peak speed of about 200 Hz, which is seven orders of magnitude slower than current microprocessors ([7] p 59). While the brain can compensate for some of this with massive parallelism, features such as “hubs,” and so on, crucial mental capacities, such as attention, rely upon serial processing, which is incredibly slow, and has a maximum capacity of about seven manageable chunks [9]. Further, the number of neurons in a human brain is limited by cranial volume and metabolism, but computers can occupy entire buildings or cities, and can even be remotely connected across the globe [7]. Of course, the human brain is far more intelligent than any modern computer. But intelligent machines can in principle be constructed by reverse engineering the brain, and improving upon its algorithms.
In sum: I have observed that there seems to be a short window from the development of the technology to access the cosmos and the development of postbiological minds and AI. I then observe that we are galactic babies: extraterrestrial civilizations are likely to be vastly older than us, and thus they would have already reached not just postbiological life, but superintelligence. Finally, I noted that they would likely have SAI, because silicon is a superior medium for superintelligence. From this I conclude that many advanced alien civilizations will be populated by forms with SAI.
Even if I am wrong – even if the majority of alien civilizations turn out to be biological – it may be that the most intelligent alien civilizations will be ones in which the inhabitants are SAI. Further, creatures that are silicon-based, rather than biologically-based, are more likely to endure space travel, having durable systems that are practically immortal, so they may be the kind of the creatures we first encounter.
HOW MIGHT SUPERINTELLIGENT ALIENS THINK
There has been a good deal of attention by computer scientists, philosophers, and the media on the topic of superintelligent AI. Nick Bostrom’s recent book on superintelligence focuses on the development of superintelligence on Earth, but we can draw from his thoughtful discussion [7]. Bostrom distinguishes three kinds of superintelligence:
(1) Speed superintelligence – even a human emulation could in principle run so fast that it could write a PhD thesis in an hour.
(2) Collective superintelligence – the individual units need not be superintelligent, but the collective performance of the individuals outstrips human intelligence.
(3) Quality superintelligence – at least as fast as human thought, and vastly smarter than humans in virtually every domain.
Any of these kinds could exist alongside one or more of the others.
An important question is whether we can identify common goals that these types of superintelligences may share. Bostrom suggests:
The Orthogonality Thesis:
“Intelligence and final goals are orthogonal – more or less any level of intelligence could in principle be combined with more or less any final goal.” ([7] p 107)
Bostrom is careful to underscore that a great many unthinkable kinds of SAI could be developed. At one point, he raises a sobering example of a superintelligence with the final goal of manufacturing paper clips ([7] pp 107–108, 123–125). While this may initially strike you as a harmless endeavor although hardly a life worth living, Bostrom points out that a superintelligence could utilize every form of matter on Earth in support of this goal, wiping out biological life in the process. Indeed, Bostrom warns that superintelligence emerging on Earth could be of an unpredictable nature, being “extremely alien” to us ([7] p 29). He lays out several scenarios for the development of SAI. For instance, SAI could be arrived at in unexpected ways by clever programmers, and not be derived from the human brain whatsoever. He also takes seriously the possibility that Earthly superintelligence could be biologically inspired, that is, developed from reverse engineering the algorithms that cognitive science says describe the human brain, or from scanning the contents of human brains and transferring them to a computer (i.e. “uploading”).
Although the final goals of superintelligence are difficult to predict, Bostrom singles out several instrumental goals as being likely, given that they support any final goal whatsoever:
The Instrumental Convergence Thesis:
Several instrumental values can be identified which are convergent in the sense that their attainment would increase the chances of the agent’s goal being realized for a wide range of final goals and a wide range of situations, implying that these instrumental values are likely to be pursued by a broad spectrum of situated intelligent agents. ([7] p 109)
The goals that he identifies are resource acquisition, technological perfection, cognitive enhancement, self-preservation, and goal content integrity (i.e. that a superintelligent being’s future self will pursue and attain those same goals). He underscores that self-preservation can involve group or individual preservation, and that it may play second-fiddle to the preservation of the species the AI was designed to serve ([7] p 109).
Let us call an alien superintelligence that is based on reverse engineering an alien brain, including uploading it, a biologically-inspired superintelligent alien (“BISA”). Although BISAs are inspired by the brains of the original species that the superintelligence is derived from, a BISA’s algorithms may depart from those of their biological model at any point.
BISAs are of particular interest in the context of alien superintelligence. For if Bostrom is correct that there are many ways superintelligence can be built, but a number of alien civilizations develop superintelligence from uploading or other forms of reverse engineering, it may be that BISAs are the most common form of alien superintelligence out there. This is because there are many kinds of superintelligence that can arise from raw programming techniques employed by alien civilizations. (Consider, for instance, the diverse range of AI programs under development on Earth, many of which are not modelled after the human brain). This may leave us with a situation in which the class of SAIs is highly heterogeneous, with members generally bearing little resemblance to each other. It may turn out that of all SAIs, BISAs bear the most resemblance to each other. In other words, BISAs may be the most cohesive subgroup because the other members are so different from each other.
Here, you may suspect that because BISAs could be scattered across the galaxy and generated by multitudes of species, there is little interesting that we can say about the class of BISAs. But notice that BISAs have two features that may give rise to common cognitive capacities and goals:
(1) BISAs are descended from creatures that had motivations like: find food, avoid injury and predators, reproduce, cooperate, compete, and so on.
(2) The life forms that BISAs are modeled from have evolved to deal with biological constraints like slow processing speed and the spatial limitations of embodiment.
Could (1) or (2) yield traits common to members of many superintelligent alien civilizations? I suspect so.
Consider (1). Intelligent biological life tends to be primarily concerned with its own survival and reproduction, so it is more likely that BISAs would have final goals involving their own survival and reproduction, or at least the survival and reproduction of the members of their society. If BISAs are interested in reproduction, we might expect that, given the massive amounts of computational resources at their disposal, BISAs would create simulated universes stocked with artificial life and even intelligence or superintelligence. If these creatures were intended to be “children” they may retain the goals listed in (1) as well.
You may object that it is useless to theorize about BISAs, as they can change their basic architecture in numerous, unforeseen ways, and any biologically-inspired motivations can be constrained by programming. There may be limits to this, however. If a superintelligence is biologically-based, it may have its own survival as a primary goal. In this case, it may not want to change its architecture fundamentally, but stick to smaller improvements. It may think: when I fundamentally alter my architecture, I am no longer me [10]. Uploads, for instance, may be especially inclined not to alter the traits that were most important to them during their biological existence.
Consider (2). The designers of the superintelligence, or a self-improving superintelligence itself, may move away from the original biological model in all sorts of unforeseen ways, although I have noted that a BISA may not wish to alter its architecture fundamentally. But we could look for cognitive capacities that are useful to keep; cognitive capacities that sophisticated forms of biological intelligence are likely to have, and which enable the superintelligence to carry out its final and instrumental goals. We could also look for traits that are not likely to be engineered out, as they do not detract the BISA from its goals.
If (2) is correct, we might expect the following, for instance.
(i) Learning about the computational structure of the brain of the species that created the BISA can provide insight into the BISAs thinking patterns. One influential means of understanding the computational structure of the brain in cognitive science is via “connectomics,” a field that seeks to provide a connectivity map or wiring diagram of the brain [11]. While it is likely that a given BISA will not have the same kind of connectome as the members of the original species, some of the functional and structural connections may be retained, and interesting departures from the originals may be found.
(ii) BISAs may have viewpoint-invariant representations. At a high level of processing your brain has internal representations of the people and objects that you interact with that are viewpoint-invariant. Consider walking up to your front door. You’ve walked this path hundreds, maybe thousands of times, but technically, you see things from slightly different angles each time, as you are never positioned in exactly the same way twice. You have mental representations that are at a relatively high level of processing and are viewpoint invariant. It seems difficult for biologically-based intelligence to evolve without viewpoint invariant representations, as they enable categorization and prediction [12]. Such representations arise because a system that is mobile needs a means of identifying items in its ever-changing environment, so we would expect biologically-based systems to have them. BISA would have little reason to give up object-invariant representations insofar as it remains mobile or has mobile devices sending it information remotely.
(iii) BISAs will have language-like mental representations that are recursive and combinatorial. Notice that human thought has the crucial and pervasive feature of being combinatorial. Consider the thought “wine is better in Italy than in China.” You probably have never had this thought before, but you were able to understand it. The key is that the thoughts are combinatorial because they are built out of familiar constituents, and combined according to rules. The rules apply to constructions out of primitive constituents, that are themselves constructed grammatically, as well as to the primitive constituents themselves. Grammatical mental operations are incredibly useful: it is the combinatorial nature of thought that allows one to understand and produce these sentences on the basis of one’s antecedent knowledge of the grammar and atomic constituents (e.g. wine, China). Relatedly, thought is productive: in principle, one can entertain and produce an infinite number of distinct representations because the mind has a combinatorial syntax [13].
{ https://www.seti.org/ }
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