I came across an article last week suggesting that extraterrestrials could be artificial intelligence beings. For quite a long time now, we have been searching for extraterrestrials and the most common belief is that they are fundamentally like us - made up of organic matter. This line of thinking has guided us in search for our cosmic neighbours, especially looking for biosignatures, that is, looking for imprints that are biological/organic. I don't seem to know exactly why we seem to have this idea that for something to be alive or conscious, they must be like us.
I feel like if we are really going to search for beings beyond our planet, our minds needs to be open to other possibilities and that certain earthly concepts needs to be well understood and redefined. Life, intelligence and consciousness are believed by us to be very different things and it happens that we seem to be the only beings possessing all three. This I personally believe may have also guided how we search for extraterrestrials, most especially life. Extraterrestrials could take any form or possess any of those properties, not necessarily all three of them simultaneously. However, we may run into conflicts when we try to classify extraterrestrials with those earthly concepts. Take for example an extraterrestrial that is only intelligent (here on earth we call it artificial intelligence), theoretically it's possible to have a machine that can trick us into thinking it's conscious because it can have all the informations (including experiences) of a conscious being in it's program/memory and has been programmed to give the right output for any given input. We would like to think we aren't such kinds of machines but how do we actually know Or know if the machine is actually a machine ?
In fact, what this also means is that even here on earth, if machines eventually becomes conscious, we may still find it hard to believe that they are conscious.
Another question is if such machine could be considered alive beings too ?
It may seem like we actually know what being alive is but the truth is that we don't.
So, why was it suggested in the article that extraterrestrials could be artificial intelligence?
Well, the line of reasoning was guided by what seems to be happening here on earth. We humans here on earth seems to be on the last line of biological evolution and as we see today, we seem to have entered the regime of artificial intelligence (AI). Just like i stated in one of my previous articles which can be found at the end of this article, evolution is happening but not the biological kind, we seem to have entered another kind of evolution, that of intelligence and AI may continue from where we stopped, they seem to have better advantages. How we get stopped or if we would get stopped is still a subject of debate but let's assume AI would actually continue from where we stopped. In the article, it's suggested that this trend may have happened on planets much older than ours, that is, probably long before life existed here on earth, that is, life just like ours once existed on other planets, they were intelligent too and at some point they were developing AI entities just like we are currently and will continue doing. For some as yet to be known reason the AI survived but they (the living creatures) didn't. If that were to be so, then why haven't we been able to get in contact with them?
If you are talking about getting in contact with them through them invading our planet, then we are likely not going to get that. The reason why we would think of them invading us is that such thought is based on our earthly experiences and such act (invasion) is a consequence of being aggressive, it happens that Darwinian evolution is responsible for our aggressive behaviour. Darwinian evolution may not be the kind of evolution that guided life on other planets, if such life were to create the AI in it's own image and likeness. Also, AI isn't biological so Darwinian evolution may not work on them. The AI may perceive the universe differently from the way we do and it may be part of why they would prefer to mind their business.
If you are talking about getting in contact with them through electromagnetic signals that they send, then how do we decode it ? - when we don't understand their language and they are not interested in getting in contact with us. 😂
They may even live in places we think "life like ours" can't exist/survive, thus limiting our search for them. In essence, the great silence may not be due to their absence but due to their preference. To be able to find them, we need to also look for technosignatures or unnatural phenomena beyond our planet.
The truth is that this take is just one of the many solutions to the Fermi paradox, nobody knows for sure what is really out there or if there's even anything out there or why we seem to be alone. I believe it's only time that can decide and we must be ready for the surprises. 😉
I guess this is where we round up, have a thoughtful day and see you when next I see you again.
For further reading
If alien life is artificially intelligent, it may be stranger than we can imagine
Could The Turing Test Be The Beginning of The End of Humanity ?
Thank you all once again for stopping by to read my jargons and also thank you 
Lastly, please don't forget to do the needful
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