Unsettling Thought of the Day

It's interesting to consider how seriously many noted thinkers take certain sci-fi-esque existential threats. When we think of artificial intelligence, do most of us really consider the culmination of the march of technological progress resulting in a Terminator- or Matrix-style struggle for existence a likely outcome? I would guess probably not. Ditto for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, the ongoing quest to find someone else, somewhere, that uses radio telescopes (or at least signals in the radio bandwidth). Would intentionally or unintentionally making our presence known to another galactic inhabitant result in an Independence Day-style brawl instead of a Contact-esque exchange of culture and knowledge? The worryworts among us aren't so sure.

When it comes to advancing artificial intelligence, some smart folks have warned against "summoning the demon":

“I am in the camp that is concerned about super intelligence,” Gates wrote. “First, the machines will do a lot of jobs for us and not be super intelligent. That should be positive if we manage it well. A few decades after that, though, the intelligence is strong enough to be a concern.” 

Gates’ concerns about AI come in the wake of Elon Musk’s remarks last year that artificial intelligence represents “our biggest existential threat” as a species and that toying with AI is akin to “summoning the demon.” 

Stephen Hawking, meanwhile, was even more blunt about it and told the BBC that “the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race,” especially since “humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete and would be superseded.”

And there's an active debate in the SETI community as to whether we ought to just be passively listening for signs of others or if we ought to be taking a more active approach to attracting attention.

Physicist Stephen Hawking has argued against that strategy, saying that the signals could attract the bad kind of aliens depicted in movies ranging from "War of the Worlds" to "Independence Day." He imagines that our first contact with extraterrestrials could be like the Native Americans' first contact with Europeans, "which didn't turn out very well for the Native Americans." 

In Hawking's view, it's better to lie low, and science-fiction author David Brin agrees. During sessions at this week's annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Jose, Brin faced off against Vakoch and the director of the SETI Institute's Center for SETI Research, Seth Shostak. 

"We've had some disagreements lately," Brin admitted.

He said the reason we haven't been hearing radio traffic from our extraterrestrial brethren could well be because "they know something we don't know." 

If the solution to the Fermi paradox, the reason we've never found evidence of any other intelligence in the universe (despite it otherwise seeming probable there could be a number of other civilizations out there), is that folks tend to "know something we don't know"--well, that's a rather ominous thought.