Susan Schneider from the University of Connecticut and the Institute for advanced study in Princeton — one of the few who seriously believes that artificial intelligence already exists, and for a long time. “I do not believe that most advanced alien civilizations will be biological,” says Schneider. “The most advanced civilization will be post-biological, in the form of artificial intelligence or alien superintelligence”.
In its latest study, she asks: do you think aliens? Do they have conscious experience? What’s it like to be an alien form?
Because our culture is prone to anthropomorphization, Schneider admits that her speculation is that the aliens are presented superintelligence — could be a finger to the sky. How she explains her point of view?
Schneider offers three observations that together support its conclusion about the existence of alien superintelligence.
The first is a “short window observation”. Once a society creates the technology that allows him to get in touch with the cosmos, is only a few hundred years before it changes its paradigm with biological artificial intelligence. This “short window” increases the chances that aliens would be post-biological.
The short window observation is supported by the cultural evolution of man, at least maintained so far. Our first radio signals a hundred and twenty years, and space exploration is a little more than fifty, but we are already immersed himself in digital technologies such as mobile phones and laptops.
The second — “huge age of alien civilizations.” Proponents of SETI often say that an alien civilization must be much older than our own. All chain of evidence result in the conclusion that the maximum age of extraterrestrial intelligence should be calculated in billions of years, in particular from 1.7 billion to 8 billion years.
If civilizations are millions or billions of years older than our own, many of them inevitably will be much smarter than we are. By our standards many of them would be Superintelligent. We just galactic babies.
But whether they are represented by forms of artificial intelligence and superintelligence? Schneider thinks so. Even if they were biological and was just using the strengthening of the biological brain, their superintelligence would be supported by artificial means, and we call it “artificial intelligence”.
The third argument Schneider — they are not carbon-based like us. Download of consciousness allows a being to practically achieve immortality, allows you to reboot and to survive in a variety of conditions in which the life based on carbon to survive would not have. In addition, the silicon seems to be more suitable medium for information processing than the brain. The peak rate of the neurons reaches about 200 Hz, which is seven orders of magnitude lower than the operating speed of modern microprocessors.
Artificial intelligence exists, and it’s billions of years
Ilya Hel