It’s a fine-tuning issue. Royal astronomer Lord Martin Rees explains that, apart from other issues, AI would last much longer in the hostile galactic environment:
Prominent British Royal Society astronomer Martin Rees thinks that thinking that ET will turn out to be AI:
“Human technological civilisation only dates back millennia (at most) – and it may be only one or two more centuries before humans, made up of organic materials such as carbon, are overtaken or transcended by inorganic intelligence, such as AI. Computer processing power is already increasing exponentially, meaning AI in the future may be able to use vastly more data than it does today. It seems to follow that it could then get exponentially smarter, surpassing human general intelligence.”
News, “Astronomer: ET is more likely to be AI than to be a life form” at Mind Matters News
Takehome: In that case, not to worry about them. If the extraterrestrials are AI, they may simply reiterate indefinitely the programs they were designed to execute long ago — we must hope, friendly ones.
Rees and colleagues assume that artificial intelligences can be creative thinkers. But the evidence so far is against that view. It’s not necessarily a matter of just ramping up the technology. By their very nature, computers compute but creative thinking is largely non-computational. We should keep that in mind when we encounter breathless media releases claiming to have overcome the problem. Also, the claim that artificial intelligence can simply evolve into artificial superintelligence stumbles on the No Free Lunch theorem…
You may also wish to read:
Does creativity just mean Bigger Data? Or something else? Michael Egnor and Robert J. Marks look at claims that artificial intelligence can somehow be taught to be creative. The problem with getting AI to understand causation, as opposed to correlation, has led to many spurious correlations in data driven papers.
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3.How can we be sure we are not just an ET’s simulation? A number of books and films are based on the Planetarium hypothesis. Should we believe it? We make a faith-based decision that logic and evidence together are reasonable guides to what is true. Logical possibility alone does not make an idea true.