Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, the production of
Speaker 1: My Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick and
Speaker 1: Rob I wanna ask you a question. I think I've
Speaker 1: talked about this on the show before, but now I
Speaker 1: can't quite recall. You've seen the movie adaptation of Carl
Speaker 1: Sagan's Contact, right, Yes, it's been a while. I saw
Speaker 1: it when it came out in theaters and I haven't
Speaker 1: seen it since. Oh wow, that is a long time ago.
Speaker 1: But yeah, it's I mean, it's really worth the watch
Speaker 1: that movie. Uh, it always makes me emotional. But like,
Speaker 1: one of the things about it that I always sticks
Speaker 1: in my brain the most is the very opening sequence
Speaker 1: where you you're starting um on Earth and you're pulling
Speaker 1: out away from Earth, and as you get farther away
Speaker 1: out into interstellar space, the signals that you are hearing
Speaker 1: coming from Earth, like you're hearing like radio broadcasts or
Speaker 1: television cast or something, and and it just gets older
Speaker 1: and older because you're you're pulling out to where older
Speaker 1: and older signals are the only ones that have reached
Speaker 1: that far. Yeah, and of course there's this very chilling
Speaker 1: moment where you get really far out there and I
Speaker 1: think you're just getting like a signal of Hitler reading
Speaker 1: a speech or something that's just like, oh god, And
Speaker 1: it really makes you think about what kind of impression
Speaker 1: humanity is making on the broader galaxy. Yeah, I I
Speaker 1: specifically remember this this from the film. Yeah, it makes
Speaker 1: makes quite an impression and makes you, yeah, a little
Speaker 1: reflective on the on on human civilization itself. And and
Speaker 1: and if anyone's receiving these signals, anything is receiving these signals,
Speaker 1: what they're picking up on and what their impression is
Speaker 1: going to be of the of human civilization? Yeah, Like,
Speaker 1: what if aliens the only thing they intercepted and had
Speaker 1: to go on was a TV edited broadcast of Batman Forever?
Speaker 1: What would they what would they conclude about Earth life?
Speaker 1: That's it's it's a it's a fun game. Uh, And
Speaker 1: it also plays into some fun sci fi to think
Speaker 1: about this. Uh. There's of course the Futurama episode where
Speaker 1: it's essentially um, uh, what what was it? Ally mccuh?
Speaker 1: What was the lawyer show, Ally McBeal. Yeah, it's like
Speaker 1: an Ally McBeal s show that was canceled or it's um,
Speaker 1: it's it's a season finale didn't air, or somehow they
Speaker 1: didn't receive it. And that's what the aliens have come
Speaker 1: to Earth in order to to get. They want the
Speaker 1: season finale for this television show. Oh. I think that's
Speaker 1: also sort of the premise of Galaxy Quest, isn't it
Speaker 1: that they see like a Star Trek style show, but
Speaker 1: they think it's a documentary about real life on Earth. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's right now. Of course, radio signals and so forth,
Speaker 1: they're not the only things that we have sent out
Speaker 1: into the void. Uh. We of course have sent machines
Speaker 1: as well. And I want us to to think back
Speaker 1: for a second to the Pioneer plaques, the gold anodized
Speaker 1: aluminum plaques attached to the nineteen seventy two Pioneer ten
Speaker 1: and the nineteen any three Pioneer eleven spacecrafts. These were
Speaker 1: the first human made objects to escape velocity from our
Speaker 1: Solar System, in the first physical emissaries of Earth life
Speaker 1: and Earth civilization. I think in the years since, they've
Speaker 1: actually been outpaced by the voyager probes in leaving the
Speaker 1: Solar System? Is that right? I think? I believe so
Speaker 1: and there's of course a similar story to tell with
Speaker 1: those uh spacecraft as well, but but uh specifically with
Speaker 1: the plaques, because of you know, these were of course machines,
Speaker 1: they were not human beings. They were powered by nuclear batteries,
Speaker 1: they had antenna, uh antenna, they had an assortment of
Speaker 1: scientific equipment on board, so they didn't look like us
Speaker 1: or in any way really represent biological life, except in
Speaker 1: the case of these plaques, which include a number of
Speaker 1: symbols detailing the origin of the spacecraft and then to
Speaker 1: sort of convey you know, you know, human understanding of
Speaker 1: where we are in the Solar System and then the
Speaker 1: larger cosmos. But then also it contained these these now
Speaker 1: iconic depictions of two human beings, a nude male and
Speaker 1: a nude female. Now it's worth noting Carl Sagan regretted
Speaker 1: that the humans on the plaque do not appear pan racial,
Speaker 1: but rather appear very Caucasian. And also the line representing
Speaker 1: the females Volva was removed, so she's kind of like, um,
Speaker 1: like a Barbie doll on this, you know, so they're
Speaker 1: not completely anatomically correct, and they seem to only represent
Speaker 1: uh Caucasians as opposed to like a the idea of
Speaker 1: representing the broader human species as a whole. Now, one
Speaker 1: of the things that's super interesting about all of this,
Speaker 1: especially given what we're gonna be talking about in this episode,
Speaker 1: is that the Pioneer probes and subsequent spacecraft are non
Speaker 1: human machines that merely bear in some cases the inscriptions
Speaker 1: of human beings, be they you know, actual inscriptions or
Speaker 1: media of some sort. Uh. And at the same time,
Speaker 1: these are our mechanical works, our machine utterances that are
Speaker 1: cast out into the void. They are us reaching out
Speaker 1: four and two other life forms. Now today, humans maintain
Speaker 1: a small orbital presence, and humans did visit the Moon
Speaker 1: in the previous century, but our outreach continues to take
Speaker 1: the form of these technological utterances. And even though it
Speaker 1: is the work of human beings on our planet to
Speaker 1: analyze the data we receive in search of possible signs
Speaker 1: of alien life, we also use artificial intelligence in many
Speaker 1: scientific and technological applications, including the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
Speaker 1: That is strange. Yeah, and uh, I guess it's interesting
Speaker 1: on a couple of levels. So, first of all, you know,
Speaker 1: one of the things humans and we've discussed this in
Speaker 1: the show before. One of the things that humans and
Speaker 1: their AI creations look for our techno signatures, and these
Speaker 1: include both radio signals and things like megastructures like dycen
Speaker 1: s fears. You know. Uh so, just as we are
Speaker 1: reaching out with our mechanical utterances, we are seeking the
Speaker 1: mechanical utterances of others. Yeah, we haven't talked about dycen
Speaker 1: spheres in a while, but unless my memory is betraying me,
Speaker 1: I think one of the ways to look for something
Speaker 1: like that would be look out there and see if
Speaker 1: there's some kind of structure object that is basically only
Speaker 1: emitting heat. And the idea there would be, you know,
Speaker 1: if all the other frequencies of radiation are being used
Speaker 1: up and only heat is coming out of it, that
Speaker 1: looks like that's probably a waste product of doing work.
Speaker 1: So it's like, you know, it's the fan on your
Speaker 1: computer just blowing out into space. Yeah. Yeah, so, and
Speaker 1: and basically coming back to the idea that advanced civilizations
Speaker 1: are going to have advanced energy requirements and therefore they're
Speaker 1: going to have to harness the energy of entire suns. Now,
Speaker 1: the other angle on this that that is interesting in
Speaker 1: one that I really hadn't thought about. Uh, is that
Speaker 1: there may be problems with our use of AI for
Speaker 1: such searches, as pointed out by Spanish clinical neuropsychologist Gabriel G.
Speaker 1: Dela Torre in a paper published in Acta Astronautica UM. Basically,
Speaker 1: the idea is AI could confuse us or tell us
Speaker 1: that it has detected impossible or false things in the data.
Speaker 1: And our AI creations can certainly reflect our own biases.
Speaker 1: We we've discussed that as well, you know, like we
Speaker 1: can and and you know this this applies to things
Speaker 1: like facial recognition, etcetera. Like we can we can easily
Speaker 1: program our own um, you know, uh overt or hidden
Speaker 1: wants and desires into the AI we create, Yeah, or
Speaker 1: not even program them. AI can acquire them from data
Speaker 1: sets based on our own reality. If it's just trying
Speaker 1: to like read what has happened in the world and
Speaker 1: learned from that. It can internalize biases that we didn't
Speaker 1: even try to explicitly give it because those biases are
Speaker 1: reflected in how the world is. Yeah. So the AI
Speaker 1: we unleash on on on such a search for alien
Speaker 1: life might simply be more inclined to find evidence of
Speaker 1: it dragging in human bias, or it could simply identify
Speaker 1: things that are not there. It could find and patterns
Speaker 1: that that that simply aren't actually there in a meaningful way.
Speaker 1: Oh well, this immediately makes me think of what was
Speaker 1: it called the Google Deep Dream that found you know,
Speaker 1: dog faces in everything, where like have a have a
Speaker 1: picture and have Google analyze it, and I think it
Speaker 1: would try to extract recognizable patterns and then amplify them.
Speaker 1: So you take a picture of your couch and suddenly
Speaker 1: your couch, you know, Google happens to detect that your
Speaker 1: couch is made out of crabs, dogs, and human faces. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so you know you wouldn't want your your your AI
Speaker 1: reporting back and saying we found it. It's a planet.
Speaker 1: We're calling it Good Dog one. It's composed entirely of
Speaker 1: dog faces, so let's celebrate. And it's under threat from
Speaker 1: the nearby crab nebula, not the crab nebula, you know,
Speaker 1: the literal crab nebula, which is made of crabs. So
Speaker 1: there's actually a specific situation that the author points out
Speaker 1: in this paper, and it concerns that the Nalia faculae
Speaker 1: of series, the largest object in the asteroid belt. Basically
Speaker 1: the situation here is bright spots were observed in a
Speaker 1: crater there, which turned out to be volcanic ice and
Speaker 1: salt emissions. You might remember seeing pictures of this on
Speaker 1: the internet. So, yeah, Series is an object in the
Speaker 1: asteroid belt, sometimes referred to I think as a dwarf
Speaker 1: planet or something. It's basically spherical, so it looks kind
Speaker 1: of like a moon, uh. And that Yeah, there was
Speaker 1: a big crater in it where right in the middle
Speaker 1: of the crater there was there were these white, bright
Speaker 1: white spots there. And obviously, you know, without knowing better
Speaker 1: and having learned our lesson from the face on Mars
Speaker 1: and all this stuff, you know, people's natural inclination was
Speaker 1: to was to pattern recognize out the butt and go
Speaker 1: like that technology or something, this is an alien Yeah, clearly. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you start looking for geometric shapes and uh and and
Speaker 1: looking for artificiality in it. And so this this particular paper,
Speaker 1: this this team from the University of Cadiz, they had
Speaker 1: already looked at what they called the cosmic guerrilla effect
Speaker 1: into only eighteen UM. This is this is um referring
Speaker 1: of course to these uh, these attention based experiments that
Speaker 1: we've we've discussed before in the show, and a lot
Speaker 1: of you've probably seen in YouTube clips where you have
Speaker 1: somebody in a guerrilla costume walk through a scene and
Speaker 1: see afterwards if anybody noticed it. Yeah, human cognition has
Speaker 1: amazing blind spots for attention that will astound you. Now
Speaker 1: we've already warned you, so if you've never tried this
Speaker 1: experiment before, you might be on your guard and already
Speaker 1: knowing what to look for. Yeah, Basically, the way it
Speaker 1: goes is like, you can do something like have a
Speaker 1: bunch of people stand in a circle throwing a basketball
Speaker 1: to each other, and you ask people to judge how
Speaker 1: many times the basketball has passed from person to person,
Speaker 1: and they'll do that, and in the middle of the video,
Speaker 1: a person in a guerrilla costume just walks through the
Speaker 1: middle of the group, and huge numbers of people while
Speaker 1: they're counting the basketball passes do not see the gorilla.
Speaker 1: And it's like, if you go back and watch the
Speaker 1: video again looking for the gorilla, it is unmissable. But somehow,
Speaker 1: when we're trained in on a certain type of cognitive
Speaker 1: task and visual processing, you can completely miss gross stimuli
Speaker 1: that that would seem impossible to miss if you were
Speaker 1: looking for them. Yeah, And of course one can imagine
Speaker 1: that if an artificial intelligence were watching the same scene,
Speaker 1: they would pick up on the gorilla. They would they
Speaker 1: would it would be able to say, oh, gorilla, unexpected
Speaker 1: guerilla has appeared in this scene and then reported as such.
Speaker 1: And so the cosmic guerrilla effect basically deals with the
Speaker 1: idea that eve there are intelligent, non earthly signals out there.
Speaker 1: They could be written dimensions that escape our perceptions, such
Speaker 1: as dark matter for example, and it would be like
Speaker 1: the guerrilla suit. You know, you just wouldn't see it.
Speaker 1: But an AI would potentially have an advantage in catching
Speaker 1: those sorts of signals. Oh okay, yeah, I see what
Speaker 1: they're saying there. So in in this between, in this
Speaker 1: this this newer study looking at the Venalia faculae. Uh,
Speaker 1: they did the following. They used a hunt sixty volunteers,
Speaker 1: human volunteers with no grounding in astronomy. I wanted to
Speaker 1: stress they're not guerillas or robots. Um. Plus, they used
Speaker 1: an artificial vision system based on con evolutional neural networks
Speaker 1: or CNNs. Both groups detected square structures in the image
Speaker 1: of the venalia faculae. But the AI also saw a triangle,
Speaker 1: and when the triangle option was then presented to humans,
Speaker 1: um the number of humans claiming to also see a
Speaker 1: triangle increase significantly. So while AI could certainly detect something
Speaker 1: that we cannot that we cannot see, it might also
Speaker 1: detect something that isn't there and then confuse us into
Speaker 1: seeing something that isn't there as well. So you can
Speaker 1: see the the sort of spiraling effects of this. Uh.
Speaker 1: And ultimately, with the aid of AI, we end up
Speaker 1: seeing signs of life where there weren't any to begin with. Okay,
Speaker 1: I see, I see what you're saying. So the idea
Speaker 1: is that humans already have a certain tendency for paradolia
Speaker 1: or paradolia the detecting of patterns or signal within noise.
Speaker 1: So that's the reason that we see faces in the clouds,
Speaker 1: or see a face on Mars, or any number of things.
Speaker 1: We look at something that in fact has no encoded
Speaker 1: information in it, and we think we can extract meaningful information,
Speaker 1: I mean no meaningful information, and we think we can
Speaker 1: extract meaningful information. Uh. You know, listening to tape hiss,
Speaker 1: you might think you hear a word or something like that.
Speaker 1: And the example here is we think we see I
Speaker 1: don't know a pyramid or a you know, a building
Speaker 1: on this asteroid or this dwarf planet, and then you
Speaker 1: can actually make it worse by if you add on
Speaker 1: an AI. The AI may in fact contribute to priming
Speaker 1: that makes you even more likely to engage in paradolia.
Speaker 1: The same way that if somebody plays you a tape
Speaker 1: hiss and doesn't just play it for you, but says,
Speaker 1: you know, hey, listen for the part where it says
Speaker 1: worship Satan or whatever, that you're probably more likely to
Speaker 1: hear it because you've been primed. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I
Speaker 1: mean it's kind of like imagine, you know, you're thinking
Speaker 1: about Fleetwood Mac albums and then you learn, oh, um,
Speaker 1: you know one of this, you know, Watson AI or
Speaker 1: whatever has determined that Tusk is the best Fleetwood Mac album.
Speaker 1: And you might think, well, you know, it wasn't my favorite,
Speaker 1: but the AI has identified it as the best Fleetwood
Speaker 1: Mac album. Perhaps it is the best Fleetwood Mac album,
Speaker 1: even though deep down you know it's rumors, even if
Speaker 1: deep down you know it's one of those early albums
Speaker 1: before Stevie Nicks was in the band. Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: exactly basically, Yeah, it comes back to that, but it
Speaker 1: has come back to the idea, yeah that we we're
Speaker 1: we're entire we're very susceptible to priming, and we could
Speaker 1: And the argument here by the authors is that you
Speaker 1: could set up a situation where where your AI dragging
Speaker 1: in certain biases is setting you up, is priming you
Speaker 1: to to with it see things that aren't there, which
Speaker 1: could ultimately just make the search for actual, you know,
Speaker 1: evidence of intelligent alien life elsewhere in the galaxy all
Speaker 1: the more difficult. So this is kind of a conundrum
Speaker 1: because the AI could it could be helpful and harmful,
Speaker 1: Like it could help with the problem of the gorilla effect,
Speaker 1: where we uh, you know, we just totally miss things
Speaker 1: that we should have seen. But it can also, on
Speaker 1: the other end, cause us to see things that aren't there. Yes,
Speaker 1: absolutely uh and and a lot of some of this
Speaker 1: isn't completely crucial to where we're going from from here
Speaker 1: in the episode. It's worth thinking and thinking about because
Speaker 1: here's the other side of things. What's out there might
Speaker 1: not simply be the mechanical utterances of biological life as well,
Speaker 1: it could be the mechanical echoes of biological life, what
Speaker 1: is sometimes referred to as post biological life, and even
Speaker 1: post biological intelligence. And this this has some huge implications
Speaker 1: um all its own. Okay, So the idea here would
Speaker 1: be not that you know, we we already expect that
Speaker 1: it's possible we could encounter alien technology rather than biological
Speaker 1: aliens themselves, just because alien technology is say a you know,
Speaker 1: an artifact of their previous occupation of a planetary surface,
Speaker 1: or a piece of technology could be their probe like
Speaker 1: our voyager probes. You know, these do not have humans
Speaker 1: in them, They're just going out there. Yeah, but this
Speaker 1: idea goes beyond that to say, well, maybe it's not
Speaker 1: just that we're encountering the mechanical residue of biological life,
Speaker 1: but we're encountering a civilization that at this point only
Speaker 1: consists of machines that there that is inherently post biological. Yeah.
Speaker 1: At what point does the residue become the thing itself
Speaker 1: as a civilization becomes increasingly technological. At what point is
Speaker 1: the technology the defining or soul aspect of the civilization. Yeah, Now,
Speaker 1: this is an idea that's certainly been disgusted in science
Speaker 1: fiction a lot. I think gene Wolfe had had one
Speaker 1: version of this, where you have an entire mechanical society
Speaker 1: and they have evolved from advance space suits for biological
Speaker 1: beings that no longer exist. Uh that sort of thing.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, okay, not to give away too much, but
Speaker 1: this is also explored in one of our favorite video
Speaker 1: games that we've talked about on the show before, a
Speaker 1: really cool game called Soma that is sort of an
Speaker 1: undersea sci fi horror game that involves a post biological existence. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: a good connection. I wasn't even thinking about Soma, but
Speaker 1: but that that is a great example of this as well.
Speaker 1: So a couple of sources that we we looked at
Speaker 1: for this that I want to go and mention here,
Speaker 1: and of course we'll get into in greater depth the
Speaker 1: work of Sti's Seth show Stock and the work of
Speaker 1: Susan Schneider, a cognitive scientist and philosopher. I was just
Speaker 1: trying to look up Susan Schneider's affiliation. I think at
Speaker 1: some point she was affiliated with the University of Connecticut.
Speaker 1: It looks like maybe the more recent one is Florida
Speaker 1: Atlantic University. But anyway, yeah, she She is a philosopher
Speaker 1: whose work we have discussed on the show before. Actually,
Speaker 1: her work came up in an episode we did about
Speaker 1: whether machines could be conscious, because she was one of
Speaker 1: the authors who advanced the idea of a test for
Speaker 1: AI consciousness that I thought was pretty interesting, and it
Speaker 1: was actually very simple. The test was basically just variations
Speaker 1: on can this machine grasp and manipulate supernatural concepts from
Speaker 1: fiction and folk belief, such as ghosts and astral projection
Speaker 1: and body swapping like in the movie Freaky Friday and stuff.
Speaker 1: You know, it might sound kind of silly, but actually
Speaker 1: these are concepts that I think you can make a
Speaker 1: good argument only intuitively make sense to us because we
Speaker 1: have a subjective internal experience, and to an intelligent machine
Speaker 1: or even a biological automaton that didn't have an internal experience,
Speaker 1: it would not make any sense to to envision something
Speaker 1: like being a ghost or an astral projection where your
Speaker 1: consciousness leaves your body, because what would be doing the
Speaker 1: leaving of the body? Mm hmmm. Yeah, you know now
Speaker 1: that I'm thinking about Susan Schneider, I think I saw
Speaker 1: her at World Science festival at some point in the past. Um,
Speaker 1: but I didn't think of it till now. I forgot
Speaker 1: to check my my old notes to see if I
Speaker 1: had anything I wanted to start with with show Stack though,
Speaker 1: uh specifically his two thousand tin paper what ET Will
Speaker 1: look Like and why Should We Care? And this Uh, Basically,
Speaker 1: this paper discusses um uh, this idea of post biological life,
Speaker 1: the search for extraterrestrial life, and it starts off by
Speaker 1: discussing our carbon bias in the hunt for for for
Speaker 1: e t s uh. You know, we we look for
Speaker 1: rocky worlds that contain liquid water as this is the
Speaker 1: path towards organic life. This is where organic life emerges from.
Speaker 1: All of our models are built on this, uh. And
Speaker 1: and that's that's the softer version of our bias, while
Speaker 1: the harder version is what what he references an individual
Speaker 1: by the name of Simon Conway Morris who argues that
Speaker 1: any evolved intelligent life form is going to roughly look
Speaker 1: like us, at least in show Stacks words quote in
Speaker 1: a dark night and from a distance. And I believe
Speaker 1: we've discussed this idea at length on the podcast. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think this was one of the earliest episodes of
Speaker 1: the show I ever did, so it was a years
Speaker 1: and years ago at this point, but we talked about
Speaker 1: Simon Conway Morris, who I think is an evolutionary biologist
Speaker 1: from Great Britain if I'm not mistaken, but he uh oh,
Speaker 1: it was the episode called Grizzly Bears from Outer Space,
Speaker 1: where so they're there are two very opposing schools of
Speaker 1: thinking about, you know, the forms intelligent aliens could take.
Speaker 1: Some people say, you know it, we can't even imagine
Speaker 1: how different they could be from us. You know, it's
Speaker 1: it's impossible for us to get outside of our own
Speaker 1: anthro anthropomorphic paradigm to imagine how biologically your friend and
Speaker 1: strange aliens could be. And Morris was on the other side.
Speaker 1: He was saying, no, they're actually principles of evolution and
Speaker 1: sort of bio chemical constraints on what life could evolve.
Speaker 1: And basically he says, there's a pretty narrow range for
Speaker 1: what types of organisms can evolve, just based on the
Speaker 1: physics and chemistry of the universe, and so we actually
Speaker 1: shouldn't expect aliens to be all that different from us.
Speaker 1: We should actually expect them to be pretty similar. In uh,
Speaker 1: in very dependable ways. Yeah, this kind of the idea
Speaker 1: whereherever you go, they're probably gonna be things like crabs,
Speaker 1: and there is going to be something like a human
Speaker 1: um chasing those crabs around with some sort of a
Speaker 1: tool that's made to catch those crabs. Yeah. I mean
Speaker 1: it's been a while, so I'm sure i'm somewhat oversimplifying.
Speaker 1: Apologies to Conway Morris, but but that's the rough outline.
Speaker 1: It is that that that biology is constrained by physics
Speaker 1: and chemistry and evolution, and those factors are going to
Speaker 1: be universal no matter what kind of planet you're on
Speaker 1: or you know, what star you're orbiting, and so there
Speaker 1: are some patterns we should repeating all throughout the galaxy.
Speaker 1: So so that's one part of it. But then apparently
Speaker 1: a lot of this bias is present. Arguably the show Stacks,
Speaker 1: you know, argues to this in the Drake equation itself,
Speaker 1: as we factor in the time it would take for
Speaker 1: life to evolve and the average lifetime of a technological society.
Speaker 1: Now we're called the Drake equation was a hypothetical way
Speaker 1: of trying to calculate the number of technological civilizations that
Speaker 1: would be present in our galaxy by multiplying together a
Speaker 1: bunch of numbers, and I don't remember what all the
Speaker 1: variables are now, but it would be something like you
Speaker 1: multiply the probability that life will arise on a planet
Speaker 1: at all times, the probability of that of any life
Speaker 1: becoming intelligent times that you know, a number of things
Speaker 1: like that. And then I think you would also have
Speaker 1: to factor in the average lifespan of a technological civilization
Speaker 1: because at some point it will probably go extinct. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and we keep coming back to the Drake equation, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, in not just spend in general, because it
Speaker 1: breaks a big quest and down into these different factors
Speaker 1: that you can then, um, you know, work with independently. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's very useful. It decomposes the problem into a discrete
Speaker 1: set of smaller questions, many of which also we still
Speaker 1: don't know the answers to. But it is at least
Speaker 1: helpful to know what those questions would be so they
Speaker 1: can be investigated individually. Now, the chance of detecting a
Speaker 1: technological civilization close to our own level of development is
Speaker 1: apparently small. Chances are if we were to detect one,
Speaker 1: they'd be thousands of years or more beyond us. And
Speaker 1: when we extrapolate that show stack says we we what
Speaker 1: we tend to do is we tend to base it
Speaker 1: on our current state of human evolution and imagine something
Speaker 1: it points out with with less hair, with fewer teeth,
Speaker 1: with wrestle, with less reliance on physical labor um, which
Speaker 1: you know, to me this instantly makes me think of
Speaker 1: like the gray ones, right, and you know the various
Speaker 1: extraterrestrial tropes that we have, which yeah, are kind of
Speaker 1: an idea of what if we continued to get less exercise,
Speaker 1: we continued to stare at screens, continue to type and
Speaker 1: stay indoors, you know, for you know, you know million
Speaker 1: years or so, Uh, what could begin to happen? It's hilarious.
Speaker 1: The gray aliens are just nerds. They're the nerds of
Speaker 1: the galaxy. They're all brains, no braun, huge head to
Speaker 1: contain that huge brain that can design their interstellar spaceships,
Speaker 1: and then skinny little arms and they stand around with
Speaker 1: their huge eyes, poking us with with sticks and going like,
Speaker 1: oh what you know, what have we learned? And yet
Speaker 1: with those huge brains, like how many cattle are they
Speaker 1: going to have to mutilate before they finally figure out
Speaker 1: what makes a cow work a lot a lot, you know.
Speaker 1: Um so, so the show Stack ultimately makes the argument
Speaker 1: that that this idea should evolve, that that or should
Speaker 1: have evolved more than it has. And he does this
Speaker 1: by pointing out that, you know that that our ideas
Speaker 1: evolved concerning life on Mars. You know, initially, uh, we
Speaker 1: we were looking at we were considering, oh, the possibilit
Speaker 1: be of intelligent canal builders on Mars. And we've discussed
Speaker 1: where that idea came from on the show before, you know, uh,
Speaker 1: sort of misinterpretation and and and straining to to see
Speaker 1: things that weren't there a little bit of that that
Speaker 1: that bias as well, uh, regarding our some of our
Speaker 1: earlier views of the red planet. But then just within
Speaker 1: a few decades that is forced to evolve when we realize, oh,
Speaker 1: there aren't canals and uh, and you know, there's instead
Speaker 1: of looking for the technological society, we're looking at the
Speaker 1: possibility of subterranean microbes. So our ideas concerning life and
Speaker 1: other star systems, they argue, has not evolved in a
Speaker 1: similar way. Well, certainly not in the popular consciousness. I
Speaker 1: would say, I mean, at least in some of the
Speaker 1: astro biology literature we read, it seems like it it
Speaker 1: is uh, pretty sober from my point of view, and
Speaker 1: the like, looking for um for biosignatures often has to
Speaker 1: do with looking for the kinds of say, gases in
Speaker 1: the atmosphere that you would expect if there were a
Speaker 1: photosynthesizing organism, which could just be a microbe. And that
Speaker 1: seems like a reasonable thing to look forward for me.
Speaker 1: But yeah, obviously, like when you're trying to think beyond that,
Speaker 1: think like if we were to make contact with another
Speaker 1: uh you know, type of alien from another type of planet,
Speaker 1: what would it be. I think that we're still pretty
Speaker 1: close to the gray aliens point of view, right, And
Speaker 1: of course I should also again point out that this
Speaker 1: is like a decade old paper at this point, so
Speaker 1: you know, to some extent, show Stack himself may have
Speaker 1: helped move the needle, but um he points out that,
Speaker 1: you know, in addition to the purely organic model for
Speaker 1: a more advanced alien life form, we also have to consider,
Speaker 1: you know, the cybernetic what if humans and indeed more
Speaker 1: advanced alien life forms have gone board to some extent,
Speaker 1: they they've augmented. They were their organic forms with mechanical precision.
Speaker 1: And there are multiple examples of this we might turn
Speaker 1: to in science fiction, you know, and it's going to range.
Speaker 1: The Hands of Steel is a good example to draw
Speaker 1: on a different recent Weird House Cinema episode. But you
Speaker 1: have stuff like the culture from Ian M. Banks novels,
Speaker 1: where it's more of a you know, positive spin on
Speaker 1: the idea, to stuff like the Borg and the Cybermen,
Speaker 1: you know, where everyone is majority or almost entirely machine
Speaker 1: and with only some slim vestige of organic life in there.
Speaker 1: You know, So everybody's a RoboCop to everybody's a grievous uh,
Speaker 1: that sort of thing. Just a planet of tom Noonan's
Speaker 1: from RoboCup two. Yeah, just screaming for their space drugs. Um.
Speaker 1: But actually no, I literally do want to come back
Speaker 1: to this point later on. Okay, But then there's one
Speaker 1: step beyond all this, and that is the complete mechanical
Speaker 1: replacement capped off by the birth and explosion of artificial intelligence.
Speaker 1: So for this in sci fi, one can certainly turn
Speaker 1: to the terminator model, you know, where AI emerges and
Speaker 1: then it kills off everything that came before UM and
Speaker 1: This is of course very popular in science fiction. Uh,
Speaker 1: you know. But then another common trope is that the
Speaker 1: machine part of a society alone survives, so the serve
Speaker 1: its outlived the masters due to you know, some sort
Speaker 1: of cataclysm or disease, what have you. But the other
Speaker 1: way of looking at it as well is it's simply
Speaker 1: the mechanical utterance is not something you know, extending from
Speaker 1: the civilization. You know, it's not just an echo, but
Speaker 1: it is the next phase of its evolution, that the
Speaker 1: machine utterance is post organic life. Perhaps the organic aspect
Speaker 1: of a civilization simply fades away and you know, given
Speaker 1: these advancements, or perhaps to use that the culture model
Speaker 1: from Banks's books, the organic source remains, but the predominant
Speaker 1: shape of the civilization in question is entirely post organic
Speaker 1: because with with the culture, for instance, it's in his
Speaker 1: in his books, it's mostly the AI, it's mostly the ships.
Speaker 1: It's mostly there, uh you know, robots and whatnot. But
Speaker 1: the humans are still there. But they're kind of like, uh,
Speaker 1: they're kind of a thing that is preserved for the
Speaker 1: sake of of preserving it. You know, they're the remora
Speaker 1: on the shark. Yeah. That but a but a ramora
Speaker 1: that is sort of share. You know, it's almost like
Speaker 1: m You know, at times there's a sense that the
Speaker 1: robots and the AI the minds of the culture. You know,
Speaker 1: they're they're babysitting for the humans. The humans are this
Speaker 1: thing that is nurtured in preserved because they are the
Speaker 1: machines passed. You know, Oh, I want so it would
Speaker 1: it be kind of like if there's a country that
Speaker 1: still has a ceremonial monarchy but the monarchs have no
Speaker 1: actual political power. Yes, yes, that would be a prime example.
Speaker 1: I think so. Showstick also points out that, given Moore's law,
Speaker 1: the successful creation of human level AI is of course
Speaker 1: going to lead to even greater AI. Quote, assuming that
Speaker 1: our own technological time scales are not grossly atypical. This
Speaker 1: implies something important for SETI. Once any society innvinced the
Speaker 1: technology that could put them in touch, once they reach
Speaker 1: a level that's comparable to our own and become detectable
Speaker 1: with our listening experiments, they are at most only a
Speaker 1: few hundred years away from changing their own paradigm of
Speaker 1: sentience to artific shoal intelligence. This is almost identical to
Speaker 1: a point that's made in the Susan Schneider chapter that
Speaker 1: we're going to talk about in a bit. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: he stresses that such an emergence would necessarily affect the
Speaker 1: biological ancestors at all, but it makes sense that post
Speaker 1: biological life would outlast and outperform the organic. We could
Speaker 1: therefore assume that any life form we encounter in the
Speaker 1: galaxy at large would be a machine. Okay, well, maybe
Speaker 1: this is a good place to get into Susan Schneider's
Speaker 1: chapter on this because she makes a similar argument could
Speaker 1: cover some similar ground, and we can look at that
Speaker 1: in detail now and then come back to the rest
Speaker 1: of her argument after that. But so this chapter is
Speaker 1: by Susan Schneider, and it's from a book called The
Speaker 1: Impact of Discovering Life Beyond Earth, edited by Stephen J. Dick,
Speaker 1: published by Cambridge University Press in and in this book,
Speaker 1: Schneider has a chapter called Alien Minds where she makes
Speaker 1: the same argument that show Stack is making here about
Speaker 1: the nature of minds we would be most likely to
Speaker 1: encounter if we make contact with another civilization, and so
Speaker 1: several of her main points would be the following. She
Speaker 1: does argue that in the most likely scenario, if we
Speaker 1: ever encounter alien agents, it is likely that they will
Speaker 1: not be biological life forms, but rather forms of super
Speaker 1: intelligent artificial intelligence or s A I. And then she
Speaker 1: also says, of course that intelligence can take many forms,
Speaker 1: but there are reasons to think these machines would be
Speaker 1: modeled on the intelligence of biological organisms that arose through evolution,
Speaker 1: and you could call these agents biologically inspired super intelligent
Speaker 1: aliens or visas b I s A. And there are
Speaker 1: a number of arguments she makes about what the cognition
Speaker 1: of those aliens would consist of, But I just want
Speaker 1: to go back to her first argument that we would
Speaker 1: be more likely to encounter post biological super intelligent AI
Speaker 1: than we would to encounter biological organisms like ourselves. And
Speaker 1: so there are three main points to her argument. The
Speaker 1: first is what she calls the short window of observation,
Speaker 1: and the argument goes like this, once a society has
Speaker 1: the level of technology that would allow them to come
Speaker 1: into contact with the rest of the cosmos, and this
Speaker 1: could include things like radio reception and transmission, rocketry and
Speaker 1: so forth, at that point that society is less than
Speaker 1: a few hundred years from changing their paradigm from biology
Speaker 1: to artificial intelligence to you know, silicon based AI. And
Speaker 1: she makes an argument for this based on previous accelerating
Speaker 1: rates of computation. So you already mentioned show stack referencing
Speaker 1: Moore's law. That would be in parallel to what he's
Speaker 1: saying there. Uh so the advance of digital technology. But
Speaker 1: she also makes reference to a thought experiment from her
Speaker 1: previous work. Uh and so I just want to read
Speaker 1: the thought experiment as she describes it, and then we
Speaker 1: can discuss pros and cons. Schneider writes, quote, suppose it
Speaker 1: is and being a techno file, you purchase brain enhancements
Speaker 1: as they become readily available. First you add a mobile
Speaker 1: internet connection to your retina. Then you enhance your working
Speaker 1: memory by adding neural circuitry. You are now officially a cyborg.
Speaker 1: Now skip ahead to twenty forty. Through nanotechnological therapies and enhancements,
Speaker 1: you are able to extend your lifespan, and as the
Speaker 1: years progress, you continue to accumulate more far reaching enhancements.
Speaker 1: By after several small but cumulatively profound alterations, you are
Speaker 1: a post human. To quote philosopher Nick Bostrom, post humans
Speaker 1: are possible future beings quote whose basic capacity so radically
Speaker 1: exceed those of present humans as to be no longer
Speaker 1: unambiguously human by our current standards. At this point, your
Speaker 1: intelligence is enhanced, not just in terms of speed of
Speaker 1: mental processing. You are now able to make rich connections
Speaker 1: that you were not able to make before. Un Enhanced
Speaker 1: humans or naturals seem to you to be intellectually disabled.
Speaker 1: You have little in common with them, but as a
Speaker 1: transhumanist you are supportive of their right not to enhance.
Speaker 1: It is now a D two hundred. For years, worldwide
Speaker 1: technological and developments, including your own enhancements, have been facilitated
Speaker 1: by super intelligent AI. Indeed, as Bostrom explains, quote, creating
Speaker 1: super intelligence maybe the last invention that humans will ever
Speaker 1: need to make, since super intelligences could themselves take care
Speaker 1: of further scientific and technological developments over time, the slow
Speaker 1: edition of better and better neural circuitry has left no
Speaker 1: real intellectual difference in kind between you and super intelligent AI.
Speaker 1: The only real difference between you and an AI creature
Speaker 1: of standard design is one of origin. You were once
Speaker 1: a natural, but you are now almost entirely engineered by technology.
Speaker 1: You are perhaps more aptly characterized as a member of
Speaker 1: a rather heterogeneous class of AI life forms, and so
Speaker 1: her thought experiment ends there, But she's trying to sketch
Speaker 1: how it would be plausible to imagine humans existing today
Speaker 1: act really becoming machines little by little over time and
Speaker 1: by extending their lifespans. Now, I will say, I do
Speaker 1: think there's there's value in this thought experiment, and I'm
Speaker 1: glad we're pursuing it. But I also do feel like
Speaker 1: I need to flag that I am significantly more skeptical
Speaker 1: of these types of common extrapolations about trans humanism and
Speaker 1: artificial intelligence than I used to be. I think my
Speaker 1: skepticism comes down to a suspicion that scenarios like these
Speaker 1: make a lot of assumptions that are just taken as obvious,
Speaker 1: but I think are actually somewhat speculative. For example, would
Speaker 1: it actually be possible to increase human cognitive capacity with
Speaker 1: neural implants that that just seems obvious. It is taken
Speaker 1: as an assumption because obviously computers can do things that
Speaker 1: human brains can't do, or at least they can do
Speaker 1: them at speeds that human brains can't match. But what
Speaker 1: if there are inherent biological throttles or gates on consciousness
Speaker 1: and cognition in brains that make the neural cyborg not
Speaker 1: much smarter than a human with access to a computer.
Speaker 1: What if there's just something physically about the properties of
Speaker 1: brains that doesn't allow you to augment them with technology
Speaker 1: like this, It just doesn't work. Or what if becoming
Speaker 1: a neural cyborg with computer enhanced cognition is actually a
Speaker 1: subjectively dreadful, miserable experience, and it turns out that once
Speaker 1: people have tried it and reported on what it's like,
Speaker 1: nobody wants to do it because it feels awful. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm like, I'm thinking, like what you have, some sort
Speaker 1: of an upgrade you received made it possible for you
Speaker 1: to say, well, let's say, be better at personal finance.
Speaker 1: But as a result, that means that there is constantly
Speaker 1: an additional background narrative in your brain and your consciousness
Speaker 1: about your personal finances. And maybe that's good for for
Speaker 1: just to you know, your your your pocketbook and your investments,
Speaker 1: but ultimately maybe it sucks for life, you know, because
Speaker 1: it's this is not the sort of balance of inattention
Speaker 1: that makes life worth living or makes it like like
Speaker 1: it was before like it. It changes you to such
Speaker 1: an extent that you want to go back you were,
Speaker 1: Like part of the joy of life is maybe not
Speaker 1: thinking about personal finance all the time. Yeah, what if
Speaker 1: part of what makes it fun to be a human
Speaker 1: is not being a computer. And if you the more
Speaker 1: you make your brain into a neural cyborg, the more
Speaker 1: miserable your life becomes you and you desperately seek to regress. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Another thing, what if consciousness is just inherently non transferable
Speaker 1: to machinery. I don't know this is the case. Some
Speaker 1: people do make this argument, and I have no reason
Speaker 1: to assume this is true. But I also have no
Speaker 1: reason to assume the opposite. There's no reason to assume
Speaker 1: that you can actually upload your mind to any kind
Speaker 1: of computer substrate. I think this is just a big
Speaker 1: question mark. We just don't know if such a thing
Speaker 1: as possible. Yeah, I mean, I tend to believe at
Speaker 1: this point that we could create something that acts like us.
Speaker 1: You can create something that is essentially like the the
Speaker 1: machine avatar of who we were, or who we thought
Speaker 1: we were, who we want to be thought of after
Speaker 1: the fact. But to the point, like is that I
Speaker 1: think when you start asking more specific questions about like
Speaker 1: is that us? Then? I don't know, I feel like
Speaker 1: it isn't is it? Could it be conscious at all?
Speaker 1: Even if it could be conscious, is there any reason
Speaker 1: to believe that you would experience it as a conscious
Speaker 1: continuation of your previous mind? Or would it just be
Speaker 1: a conscious copy of you? Yeah? Or I mean when
Speaker 1: you start asking questions like that and then you get
Speaker 1: into questions of like, well, and who I am now?
Speaker 1: Is this really a continuation of who I was five
Speaker 1: years ago? You know? I mean, you start seeing all
Speaker 1: the flaws in this um narrative of self and identity,
Speaker 1: and maybe it becomes maybe that's the thing. Maybe we
Speaker 1: reach a kind of we reach a point where we
Speaker 1: realized none of it is real, Like there is no
Speaker 1: real continuation of the self, and therefore why not create
Speaker 1: like three different machine avatars of my self and have
Speaker 1: them continue my legacy for me? I just want to
Speaker 1: mention a few other questions that just popped into my
Speaker 1: mind this morning. Uh, what if there are actually hard
Speaker 1: limits on certain kinds of intelligence, whether you're talking about
Speaker 1: a biological brain or a computer. What if certain types
Speaker 1: of complex problem solving within a coherent agent system, meaning like,
Speaker 1: you know, a single sort of mental workspace that always,
Speaker 1: that is coherent and communicates with every part of itself.
Speaker 1: What if there are limits on what kind of intelligence
Speaker 1: can happen in an agent system like that or different thing.
Speaker 1: What if biological organisms in general, even across the galaxy,
Speaker 1: have an overwhelming tendency to revolt against the cultural transition
Speaker 1: to machine life and will always or almost always end
Speaker 1: up engaging in something like Frank Herbert's but Larry and Jihad,
Speaker 1: you know, where you shall not make a machine in
Speaker 1: the image of a human brain. Yeah, yeah, you want
Speaker 1: to end up moving towards that sort of Star Wars
Speaker 1: model where yeah, you have all these advanced machines everywhere,
Speaker 1: but they're only working as servants you know there, Uh,
Speaker 1: with a few exceptions that I guess kind of prove
Speaker 1: the rule in that universe. So anyway, literally hundreds of
Speaker 1: questions like this I think I could list, and they
Speaker 1: start coming to mind when I think about it. And
Speaker 1: while I don't assume that any of them are strong
Speaker 1: enough to completely disable the trans humanist proposition, I also
Speaker 1: wonder if some trans humanist and super intelligence thinking is
Speaker 1: too quick to hand wave past these kinds of questions.
Speaker 1: But like I said earlier, I do think this type
Speaker 1: of scenario that Schneider is talking about is plausible enough
Speaker 1: to entertain as a thought experiment, So I want to
Speaker 1: keep going with it. And one thing I will say
Speaker 1: in favor of of her argument is that, at least intuitively,
Speaker 1: I think her timeline is reasonable, meaning that I think
Speaker 1: if it is possible to create an AI super intelligence
Speaker 1: and that humans or their biological alien counterparts do at
Speaker 1: some point merge with or fade into that machine AI superintelligence,
Speaker 1: I don't see why it would take more than a
Speaker 1: few hundred years after the invention of computers basically for
Speaker 1: that to happen. And even if it took tens of
Speaker 1: thousands of years, I think Schneider's point on this first
Speaker 1: point she's making is basically correct. The time between when
Speaker 1: a species starts technologically interacting with the universe beyond its
Speaker 1: home planet and when it becomes dominated by post biological intelligence,
Speaker 1: if this is possible, that that time gap seems very
Speaker 1: small and vanishingly small compared to the lifespan of a
Speaker 1: planetary biosphere. Yeah, so you come back to that scenario
Speaker 1: that show Stack was talking about, where once you're detectable,
Speaker 1: it's just a matter of time before the machine administration
Speaker 1: moves in. So one instantly think that you can imagine
Speaker 1: the the the aliens out there, if they're listening in
Speaker 1: on this, they're like, well, should we contact them now?
Speaker 1: They're like, well, no, they're they're about to change administration,
Speaker 1: Like the humans in charge now are about to hand
Speaker 1: off in relatively little time. From our standpoint, two machines
Speaker 1: that will be it'll be just easier to communicate with
Speaker 1: those machines and we'll we'll there'll be a lot more
Speaker 1: pleasant to deal with as opposed to these organic beings.
Speaker 1: So yeah, I would say I'm more bullish on the
Speaker 1: second half of Schneider's proposition here than the first half.
Speaker 1: I don't know if the age of machines is coming,
Speaker 1: that's a big question mark for me, but I will
Speaker 1: agree that if it's coming, it's coming very fast, yes,
Speaker 1: and if it is coming, we welcome our machine over lords.
Speaker 1: But anyway, that that was all just Schneider's first point
Speaker 1: about the short window of observation. A couple of other
Speaker 1: points that are quicker to make. The second one that
Speaker 1: she makes is the greater age of alien civilizations. So
Speaker 1: here she cites some pre existing statistical work making the
Speaker 1: point that and I think show Stack made this point
Speaker 1: as well. If you assume a random distribution of biological
Speaker 1: evolution across the galaxy, most alien civilizations should be expected
Speaker 1: to be millions or billions of years older than us.
Speaker 1: So either there's something very special and rare about Earth life,
Speaker 1: or we're one of many planets with with with powerful
Speaker 1: intelligence and civilization. And if we are, we we should
Speaker 1: expect to be on the young side of that equation.
Speaker 1: So if you couple this with the previous points, she argues,
Speaker 1: you start getting toward an interesting conclusion. Again, these two
Speaker 1: points are on average, we should assume that other alien
Speaker 1: civilizations have been around for millions or billions of years,
Speaker 1: and on average alien civilizations transform themselves into post biological
Speaker 1: superintelligence is very fast. There's a very short window of uh,
Speaker 1: technological civilizations that are still biological in nature. And so
Speaker 1: if you put those things together, you should expect, Yeah,
Speaker 1: if we're meeting something, it's probably post biological. And I
Speaker 1: will say as far as my reaction, again, I have
Speaker 1: lodged my moderate skepticism about the trans humanist and AI extrapolations,
Speaker 1: mind uploading and so forth. But I followed the argument
Speaker 1: so far. Her third point, and I think this is
Speaker 1: an interesting one. She says silicon is a better medium
Speaker 1: for intelligence, at least better than carbon, and this one
Speaker 1: is interesting. Basically, Schneider argues that carbon based life forms
Speaker 1: will recognize the inherent physical advantages in transferring themselves into
Speaker 1: silicon based machines. Again, you know, flag my skepticism about
Speaker 1: mind uploading, but if it's possible, okay, I follow the argument.
Speaker 1: She writes, quote, silicon appears to be a better medium
Speaker 1: for information processing than the brain itself. Neurons reach a
Speaker 1: peak speed of about two hundred hurts, which is seven
Speaker 1: orders of magnitude slower than current microprocessors. While the brain
Speaker 1: can compensate for some of this with massive parallelism features
Speaker 1: such as hubs and so on, crucial mental capacity such
Speaker 1: as attention rely on cereal processing, which is incredibly slow
Speaker 1: and has a maximum capacity of about seven manageable chunks.
Speaker 1: I did not follow up on what she means by
Speaker 1: chunks there, but she cites Miller from the ninety six
Speaker 1: This must be a computational science paper. She goes on
Speaker 1: further the number of neurons in a human brain is
Speaker 1: limited by cranial volume and metabolism, but computers can occupy
Speaker 1: entire buildings or cities, and can even be remotely connected
Speaker 1: across the globe. Of course, the human brain is far
Speaker 1: more intelligent than any modern computer, but intelligent machines can
Speaker 1: in principle be constructed by reverse engineering the brain and
Speaker 1: improving upon its algorithms. You know this. This reminds me
Speaker 1: how in in in Banks's culture books, their parts where
Speaker 1: the machines are working with humans, because you have human
Speaker 1: characters that are playing an important role, because that that
Speaker 1: makes it an interesting story. Um. But the machines, of
Speaker 1: course are communicating with each other. The minds are communicating
Speaker 1: with each other. It just blindingly fast speeds. And then
Speaker 1: when they need to communicate with an organic being, it
Speaker 1: just like it's just slow as Christmas, you know, it
Speaker 1: just drags everything to a halt basically for them. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's funny, And it's also funny this last comment she makes,
Speaker 1: I think is interesting about the cutthroat design idea, where
Speaker 1: an intelligent machine could just say like, oh, I could
Speaker 1: make myself better than a brain just by figuring out
Speaker 1: how brains work reverse engineering that making myself into a
Speaker 1: brain and then upgrading myself. But anyway, altogether, Schneider's thinks
Speaker 1: that these points should convince us that alien civilizations that
Speaker 1: we encounter are way more likely to be post biological
Speaker 1: machines super intelligent aies than they are to be biological
Speaker 1: organisms made of meat. And Schneider also makes one point
Speaker 1: that I think is very good if it's possible to
Speaker 1: become a post biological super intelligence, but not a common
Speaker 1: fate for all intelligent alien species. So maybe not all
Speaker 1: alien civilizations go this direction. The ones we encounter are
Speaker 1: still more likely to be the ones that do become
Speaker 1: post biological super intelligent machines, because the beings will be
Speaker 1: better at space travel and better at spreading across the galaxy.
Speaker 1: Think about the fact that they have no biological risks
Speaker 1: from space travel like we do. Yeah, show Stack gets
Speaker 1: to this point as well, that yeah, there would still
Speaker 1: be risks. Space is still incredibly dangerous, but the bio
Speaker 1: risks would be effectively removed. And then since you would
Speaker 1: uh as a machine intelligence, you would be effectively immortal
Speaker 1: um in ways that in ways that even a in
Speaker 1: a you know, a very long living biological organism would
Speaker 1: not um All trips would be the same distance, all
Speaker 1: trips would have the same duration, because time kind of
Speaker 1: loses all meaning. If it takes you a hundred years,
Speaker 1: a thousand years, uh, you know, several thousand years to
Speaker 1: reach the place you're going, that kind of loses its importance.
Speaker 1: If there is no endpoint to your existence. Ye, Rob
Speaker 1: nine thousand does not care. Yeah, alright. So in dealing
Speaker 1: with this question of post biologic logical intelligence and potentially
Speaker 1: encountering post biological intelligence, one of the big questions, of course,
Speaker 1: is well, what would it mean for us? What would
Speaker 1: what would the relationship be? What would a post biological
Speaker 1: civilization want? And I guess the first way to tackle
Speaker 1: that is to sort of look at the precursor, what
Speaker 1: does a biological civilization want? Well, as a Stephen Hawking
Speaker 1: and many others have pointed out, if we're to use
Speaker 1: our only model of intelligent life that we have, which
Speaker 1: is us, then obviously biological aliens would be interested in
Speaker 1: things like domination, resource acquisition, possibly religious convergence. Or if
Speaker 1: we were to tie the Simpsons into all of this, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, we could think to the citizen king Treehouse
Speaker 1: of Horror segment. They might be interested and interested in
Speaker 1: us merely in order to point a giant space laser
Speaker 1: at another planet. So resources, yes, but also maybe strategic
Speaker 1: location in some greater interstellar conflict. I just had an
Speaker 1: idea that I don't know if it makes any sense,
Speaker 1: but I was thinking about some of the some of
Speaker 1: the horrors of colonialism on Earth. We're not just about
Speaker 1: the extraction of resources from the colony, but also about
Speaker 1: the acquisition of customers within a colony for the businesses
Speaker 1: in the in the home country. And I wonder could
Speaker 1: there be some kind of comparison to this in in
Speaker 1: a galactic sense, like, uh, could be possible that aliens
Speaker 1: would want to initiate contact with Earth in order to
Speaker 1: acquire some analogy to customers buyers for their products. Oh my, uh,
Speaker 1: nothing come into mind. But I'm sure this, this has
Speaker 1: got to have been This has had to have been
Speaker 1: explored in in science fiction, especially like like Reagan era
Speaker 1: sci fi. You know, that's a that's commenting on capitalism
Speaker 1: and so forth. Like In fact, she like surely Philip K.
Speaker 1: Dick explored the this idea a little home that was
Speaker 1: up his alley. I can't think of one but that
Speaker 1: that would be an amazing Philip K. Dick theme. I'm
Speaker 1: sure he did it. Yeah, so again, you know, if
Speaker 1: we only have to have our own intelligence really to
Speaker 1: base most of this off on as a model, but uh,
Speaker 1: this would it would seem to present a rather dark scenario.
Speaker 1: Though certainly biological aliens could be different. You know, they
Speaker 1: could they could just want to be our friends. They
Speaker 1: could want it that they could have, you know, they
Speaker 1: could come in peace, as they say. I mean Stephen Hawking, Yeah,
Speaker 1: he was very cautious about the idea of ct He
Speaker 1: was like, we don't we don't want anything to do
Speaker 1: with other aliens in the galaxy because the chances are
Speaker 1: it would not go well for us. But people who
Speaker 1: are involved in set itself in CETI type research, it
Speaker 1: seems to be more often, I mean, I probably there's
Speaker 1: a selection effect by nature of the fact that they
Speaker 1: are part of this effort to reach out and establish
Speaker 1: contact with other civilizations at least detect their presence. There
Speaker 1: seems to be more optimism in the CETI crowd to me, like, yeah,
Speaker 1: less a less of an automatic assumption that the way
Speaker 1: aliens view us would be would be extractive. And you know,
Speaker 1: more of an idea that uh, an alien that as
Speaker 1: a civilization progresses towards the point where it can reach
Speaker 1: out into the cosmos. It also maybe matures like it.
Speaker 1: It reaches its own form of humanism and maybe that
Speaker 1: extends beyond its own species. Yeah, and I guess too.
Speaker 1: There's also the argument it's kind of like moving into
Speaker 1: a new neighborhood. Do you want to say hi to
Speaker 1: your new neighbors, uh, you know, the first couple of weeks,
Speaker 1: or do you want to wait until there's a conflict
Speaker 1: you know? Uh, you know, what do you want? What
Speaker 1: do you want your first communication going to be to be?
Speaker 1: Because non detection is not a long term possibility. You know,
Speaker 1: they're going to see you leaving your house at some
Speaker 1: point you're gonna have that awkward moment where do you
Speaker 1: make eye contact and then you're like, oh, yeah, we
Speaker 1: never actually said hi to each other, you know. So,
Speaker 1: you know a lot of this concerns biological life. These
Speaker 1: questions and some of these ideas don't entirely disappear when
Speaker 1: we consider uh, post biological life. But again, the question
Speaker 1: is what about alien AI? What would a post biological
Speaker 1: species want with us, what would they, as show stack
Speaker 1: points puts it, what would they quote find interesting to do? Um,
Speaker 1: which I like. I like the way of pointing that out.
Speaker 1: It's like it's it s to a certain extent, it
Speaker 1: goes beyond like goals and things that it needs, like
Speaker 1: what what does it do with its time? Like? What
Speaker 1: is its purpose? And show stack points out that sci
Speaker 1: Fi has certainly explored this topic, but he thinks only
Speaker 1: three things seem plausible enough to consider discussion. So, first
Speaker 1: of all, he argues that since quote high speed computation
Speaker 1: requires compact configuration, the machines would likely remain localized and
Speaker 1: this would better benefit you know, swarm or shared processing,
Speaker 1: so they wouldn't be spread out over vast distances. They
Speaker 1: might be localized into an area only thousands of light
Speaker 1: years across. So if you're imagining you know, something like,
Speaker 1: uh that the post biological necrons from war or forty,
Speaker 1: you know that they just want to spread out all
Speaker 1: over the galaxy and take it over like that wouldn't
Speaker 1: make as much sense because they want to maintain maximum uh,
Speaker 1: you know, computational power, So they're going to stick to
Speaker 1: their own kingdom. Coming back to Susan Schneider, she argues
Speaker 1: that biologically inspired super intelligences would would tend to have
Speaker 1: one or more what she calls global workspaces, And I
Speaker 1: actually want to read her quote on this because I
Speaker 1: thought this was interesting. She says, when you search for
Speaker 1: a fact or concentrate on something, your brain grants that
Speaker 1: sensory or cognitive content access to a quote global workspace,
Speaker 1: where the information is broadcast to attentional and working memory
Speaker 1: systems for more concentrated processing, as well as to the
Speaker 1: massively parallel channels in the brain. The global workspace operates
Speaker 1: as a singular place when important information from the senses
Speaker 1: is considered in tandem, so that the creature can make
Speaker 1: all things considered judgments and act intelligently in light of
Speaker 1: all the facts at its disposal. In general, it would
Speaker 1: be inefficient to have a sense or cognitive capacity that
Speaker 1: was not integrated with the others, because the information from
Speaker 1: this sense or cognitive capacity would be unable to figure
Speaker 1: in predictions and plans based on an assessment of all
Speaker 1: the available information. And this comes into play here because
Speaker 1: it seems like a civilization based on a super intelligent
Speaker 1: AI UH if it's spread itself too far, it would
Speaker 1: become impossible to maintain a global workspace at speed. It
Speaker 1: would start having information that was not shared, and that
Speaker 1: would result in inefficiencies. Yeah, that that lines up, But
Speaker 1: I think goather well with this. Now. Now, the second
Speaker 1: point that Stack makes is that given the very short
Speaker 1: time scale for improvement, uh, it would be winner takes all.
Speaker 1: The first machine society to rise would dominate at least
Speaker 1: within a certain volume of space, you know. Going back
Speaker 1: to point number one. Um. Now, he argues that there
Speaker 1: there could be a little wiggle room for some machine
Speaker 1: civilizations to overtake elder civilizations. Um. But that a sufficiently
Speaker 1: advanced machine civilization could rule its fiefdom indefinitely. Um uh Now,
Speaker 1: But but I wonder if if another way of looking
Speaker 1: at this sort of thing would be, you know, a
Speaker 1: resulting confederacy of machine culture is a kind of multicultural
Speaker 1: machine super civilization where maybe you have the you know,
Speaker 1: the one older, more advanced, and you know, unconquerable, um,
Speaker 1: machine culture, but then it ends up absorbing other ones
Speaker 1: that are part of it, that have some purpose or
Speaker 1: role within the machine whole, but are not like the
Speaker 1: driving force. Kind of like subservient machine cultures, I guess.
Speaker 1: And then number three, even for machines, he points out
Speaker 1: space is dangerous and our Winnian selection would take place. Quote,
Speaker 1: if a machine exists now, it's because its mode of
Speaker 1: existence has kept this device from natural disaster, or possibly
Speaker 1: even from deliberate disaster. If such a phenomen gonna exists
Speaker 1: for machines, perhaps it makes a lot of copies, or
Speaker 1: at least a few copies, updating as necessary. It does
Speaker 1: something to withstand inevitable catastrophe. Yeah, that's very interesting. I
Speaker 1: mean to pick up on this. There's no reason to
Speaker 1: say that biological evolution is a process, that is, that
Speaker 1: is inherently tethered only to carbon based organisms that reproduce,
Speaker 1: you know, that that have genetic code based on DNA,
Speaker 1: anything that's subject to survival and reproduction. And I would
Speaker 1: guess that machines, you know, computational machines, would in some
Speaker 1: way be subject to survival and reproduction. They can make
Speaker 1: copies of themselves, Uh, they can iterate their code. That
Speaker 1: it seems like those things would be subject to a
Speaker 1: form of natural selection. Though. The interesting thing there would be,
Speaker 1: I guess, would would it be useful to think about
Speaker 1: their code in terms of something like genes, because of course,
Speaker 1: you know, genes within biological organisms can have gambits to
Speaker 1: survive on their own regardless of the success of the
Speaker 1: overall organism. Right Like, if an individual gene in your
Speaker 1: body figures out a way to make lots of copies
Speaker 1: of itself without regard to the health of its you know,
Speaker 1: to to the health of the body as a whole,
Speaker 1: it will do that. You know. It's it's the genes
Speaker 1: just trying to get out there. I wonder if you
Speaker 1: could look at individual pieces of I don't know what
Speaker 1: code or nodes or processing functions within a machine intelligence
Speaker 1: that would behave in the same way. Yeah. Yeah, So
Speaker 1: it seems like that idea you could you could come
Speaker 1: up with a concept where a machine civilization would have
Speaker 1: a tendency to colonize new areas, you know, because it
Speaker 1: would give itself room to uh to copy itself. Uh.
Speaker 1: And then of course you have to think about the
Speaker 1: constraints about processing speed. It's that run you know, having
Speaker 1: you know, sticking to a local domain. But maybe that
Speaker 1: would allow for some level level of mechanical budding to
Speaker 1: take place. Yeah, maybe cutting off pieces of itself would
Speaker 1: actually make it more resilient, to say, infection by viral
Speaker 1: bits of code. Yeah, well, you know, thinking about it
Speaker 1: even more now, So say say you have this mechanical
Speaker 1: supercivilization and it's again, is staying within a certain area? Well,
Speaker 1: if it is, if it definitely, if it wants to survive,
Speaker 1: if that is like a driving force in it, that
Speaker 1: is like just coded into it maybe from its biological
Speaker 1: you know, elder creators, then then perhaps copying itself not
Speaker 1: only within its realm, but in other realms like that
Speaker 1: is one way to try and survive, not only like
Speaker 1: nearby rooms, maybe far flung realms, you know, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: to get outside of not only this star system, but
Speaker 1: this system of systems, to get outside of the galaxy
Speaker 1: if possible. That's interesting. Okay, folks, this is one of
Speaker 1: those episodes that went very long, and we have decided
Speaker 1: it is best to divide this talk in two parts.
Speaker 1: So we're gonna have to cut part one right here,
Speaker 1: but come back can join us on Thursday for the
Speaker 1: continuation of our discussion in Art two. In the meantime,
Speaker 1: if you would like to check out other episodes of
Speaker 1: Stuff to Blow your mind, you know, where to find
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Speaker 1: producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get
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