Susan Schneider of the University of Connecticut and the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton is one of the few who seriously believes that artificial intelligence has been around for quite some time. “I don't believe that the most advanced alien civilizations will be biological,” says Schneider. "The most advanced civilizations will be postbiological, in the form of artificial intelligence or extraterrestrial superintelligence."
In her latest research, she asks the question: what do aliens think? Do they have conscious experiences? How does it feel to be an alien form?
Since our culture is prone to anthropomorphization, Schneider admits that her assumption - that aliens are superintelligent - might be a finger in the sky. How does she explain her point of view?
Schneider offers three observations that together support her conclusion about the existence of extraterrestrial superintelligence.
The first is the “short observation window”. Once a society creates the technology that allows it to come into contact with space, there are only a few hundred years left before it shifts its paradigm from a biological species to an artificial intelligence. This "short window" increases the chances that aliens will be a postbiological species.
The short observation window is supported by human cultural evolution, at least so far. Our first radio signals are only one hundred and twenty years old, and space exploration is in a little over fifty, but we have already immersed ourselves headlong into digital technologies such as mobile phones and laptops.
The second is “the huge age of alien civilizations”. SETI proponents often say that alien civilizations must be much older than our own. All chains of evidence lead to the conclusion that the maximum age of extraterrestrial intelligence should be in the billions of years, in particular from 1.7 billion to 8 billion years.
If civilizations are millions or billions of years older than ours, many of them will inevitably be much smarter than us. By our standards, many of them will be superintelligent. We're just galactic babies.
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But will they be represented by forms of artificial intelligence and superintelligence? Schneider thinks yes. Even if they were biological and just used the amplification of the biological brain, their superintelligence would be reinforced by artificial methods, and we would call it "artificial intelligence."
Schneider's third argument is that they won't be carbon-based like we are. Loading consciousness allows a creature to practically achieve immortality, allows it to reboot and survive in a variety of conditions in which life on the basis of carbon could not survive. In addition, silicon seems to be a more suitable medium for processing information than the brain. The peak speed of neurons reaches about 200 Hz, which is seven orders of magnitude lower than the speed of modern microprocessors.
Ilya Khel
