Can artificial intelligence help us find aliens?

According to the Scientific American Journal, in the process of finding the SETI, we often look for life with similar wisdom, technology and communication. But Jill Tarter, an astronomer and pioneer of SETI (search for extraterrestrial civilizations), points out that this approach means we are looking for detectable technical features, such as radio transmission, rather than searching for alien intelligence. . Now, scientists are thinking about whether artificial intelligence (AI) can help us find aliens in ways that humans have not yet thought of.

"decoding" wisdom

When we think about alien wisdom, we need to remember that human beings are not the only intelligent life on earth. Chimpanzees have their own culture and can use tools; spiders use spider webs to process information, cetaceans have various dialects, crows know how to compare, and beavers are great engineers. These non-human wisdom, language, culture and technology are always around us. Extraterrestrial intelligence may look like octopus, ants, dolphins, or machines, or something that is completely different from any life on Earth. Extraterrestrial life may be very different from what we imagine, but these ideas are not even true on Earth, and are unlikely to be ubiquitous in interstellar space.

If many of us have only recently realized the non-human wisdom on earth, what do we miss when we imagine alien life? At the beginning of 2018, many astronomers, neurologists, anthropologists, AI researchers, historians, and other professionals gathered at the SETI InsTItute in Silicon Valley to participate in the "Decoding Alien Wisdom" seminar. .

Astrobiologist Nathalie Cabrol organized the seminar around her 2016 paper Alien mindscapes, calling for a new SETI roadmap and “finding” We don't know the life to build a long-term vision." In the paper, Kabulo asked how SETI can transcend human beings to “find humanoid alien intelligence” and imagine the truly different alien wisdom with the way of “jumping out of our brains”.

Different ideas

Silicon Valley is known for its emphasis on “subversive” thinking, which can be interwoven with SETI's research. Silicon Valley ideas, technology and funding have become increasingly important since the US government stopped funding SETI in the mid-1990s. For example, the SENI Institute's Allen Telescope array was named after Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, who contributed $25 million to the project. In 2015, technology investor Yuri Milner announced the Breakthrough Listen program, a 10-year, $100 million "SETI program."

Now, the SETI Institute, NASA, Intel, IBM, and other partners are solving space science problems through an AI R&D project called the Frontier Development Lab.

Lucianne Walkowicz, a postdoctoral in astrophysics at the Library of Congress, described an AI-based approach as "signal-agnostic search" in the 2017 Breakthrough Discuss. Walkwicks explains that this means using machine learning to look at any set of data without predetermined categories, rather than having them aggregate into their "natural categories." The software then lets us know what are the outliers that may be the target of additional investigations.

It turns out that SETI researchers believe that AI may be useful in their work because they believe that machine learning is good at finding differences. But its success depends on how we conceptualize the differences.

More intelligent than slime mold?

The way of thinking “being out of our brains” also means thinking outside of our scientific, social and cultural systems. But what do we do? AI has been used to look for alien radio signal simulations that researchers have imagined, but now SETI researchers hope it will find something we haven't found yet.

Graham Mackintosh, an AI consultant at the SETI Institute, said that aliens may be doing things we can't imagine. The technology they use is so different that we don't even look for them. He suggested that AI may be able to provide us with advanced thinking. We may not be able to make ourselves smarter, but maybe we can make machines that are smarter than humans.

At this year's Breakthrough Discuss conference, astrophysicist Martin Rees also expressed the same hope that AI might help find "the wisdom that transcends humanity, just as our intelligence transcends cosmids."

First contact

If we have an alien bacterium, what speculation can we make about its intelligence? One of the big challenges for SETI is that we don't know the limits of life or intelligence, so we need to be open to all the different possibilities. ?

Wisdom may occur in the atmosphere or geology of the planetary scale, or as an astrophysics phenomenon. For example, the largest organism on Earth may be a fungus called Armillaria ostoyae in the Blue Mountains of eastern Oregon that extends 10 square kilometers and has a life span between 2000 and 9000. .

Although this fungus may not be the intelligent life that most people think of, it reminds us to always pay attention to unexpected things when looking for life and wisdom, and what we might miss at our feet. Different perceptions of wisdom mean that understanding anything we encounter may be the first contact with a life of wisdom. This may include our first contact with Universal Artificial Intelligence (AGI), which is closer to the perceptual computer HAL 9000 or Star Trek: The Next in 2001 Space Walk (2001: A Space Odyssey) Data in Generation).

When we use machine learning to extend SETI search, we also need social science to understand how our ideas affect the future of AI and how AI will shape our future ideas.

Interdisciplinary future

To avoid the “people-centric” perspective in SETI, we need to consider how to code the difference ideas into AI and how to form the results. This is crucial for discovering and identifying intelligent life that we don't know yet. Some of the methods used in anthropology can help us identify different concepts that we are familiar with and that appear to be invisible, just as many people differ between nature and culture, biology and technology.

Recent research on algorithms reveals how our naturalization ideas shape the technology we create and how we use it. And Google's notorious AI chat bot Tay reminds us that the AI ​​we create can easily reflect the worst part of these ideas. We may never completely stop putting bias into the search engine and SETI's search strategy, or encode it into AI. But through interdisciplinary collaboration between scientists and sociologists, we can critically think about how to conceptualize differences.

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