by Elizabeth Rayne
March 21, 2025
from PopularMechanics Website





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"It will be essential for us as a species

to maintain superiority, but [...]

we are not the pinnacle of creation,"

Harvard Professor says.

The human brain is a marvel of neurons firing electrical impulses through complex networks of neural pathways.

It can also be notoriously slow when it comes to figuring out new solutions for complicated tasks like designing new computer chips.

That's why a research team from Princeton University and the Indian Institute of Technology decided to hand the job over to artificial intelligence.

What the A.I. came up with was almost alien.

With strange circuitry patterns no Homo sapiens brain could have dreamt up (something even the researchers admitted), the chips could have passed for some questionable artifact on Ancient Aliens.

Even stranger was how efficient the chips were - and how little their human progenitors understood them.

This phenomenon did not surprise Harvard University professor and virtuoso theoretical physicist Avi Loeb, Ph.D., who is convinced A.I. will soon surpass anything the human brain's flesh-and-blood machinery is capable of.

"We're just in the infancy of this era," Loeb says.

 

"It will be essential for us as a species to maintain superiority, but it will illustrate to us that we are not the pinnacle of creation."

In a blog post (Viewing AI as Alien Intelligence), Loeb ponders how advanced the artificial intelligence of hypothetical alien civilizations could have possibly grown - especially civilizations that might have already been around for billions of years before anything vaguely humanoid appeared in the cosmos.

What would the AI's capabilities look like?

 

What would be its limits?

 

Are there even any limits left?

Humans only think themselves superior because we haven't yet made contact with any type of extraterrestrial intelligence, Loeb says, and he thinks,

we will eventually be shocked to find an A.I. probe from another planet as evidence of creatures far more intelligent than we could even begin to comprehend.

And that could make us question our own consciousness.

"Most people are under the illusion that there is nothing better than human intelligence, and they talk about consciousness, free will as qualities that only humans are able to possess," he explains.

 

"I think once the A.I. systems have more parameters than the human brain, they will show the qualities we call free will consciousness."

"If some creature somewhere else

has developed artificial intelligence

to improve itself, you'll have a machine

not only smarter than all humans,

but all aliens too."

Loeb thinks that A.I. will evolve so fast - especially once machines invent even smarter machines that invent even smarter machines - that the A.I.-produced computer chips of today will look almost primitive in the future.

He is not the only one to think A.I. will "Darwinize" itself...

Seth Shostak, Ph.D., senior astronomer of the SETI Institute, has parallel views.

Shostak thinks we are essentially inventing the machines that will be our successors, and this has probably happened many times over with technology engineered by alien civilizations far older than humanity.

"The aliens that we discover are probably going to be in A.I. form," he says.

 

"Machine intelligence can evolve much more quickly than biological intelligence, and if you use it to design the next generation for machines, you can use those machines to design the next generation, and so on."

When you have machines inventing machines inventing machines, evolution happens at warp speed compared to biological evolution.

We are still at about the same level of intelligence as our hominid ancestors who hunted mammoths a million years ago. The only things we have to show for it are advanced technological developments born from a brain made of nerves, blood, and spongy gray matter.

The silicon in artificial brains could easily outperform our own neural impulses, and they might not only eclipse our species.

"If some creature somewhere else has developed artificial intelligence to improve itself, you'll have a machine not only smarter than all humans, but all aliens too," Shostak says.

Both Shostak and Loeb agree that our first confirmed alien encounter is far more likely to be with alien A.I. than the aliens that invented it, and that likewise, humans will (and should) use A.I. to travel to other planets by proxy.

Machine intelligence does not suffer health issues from microgravity, need nutrients, or grow lonely.

Mars is being looked at as the next frontier for space exploration. However, the radiation-blasted planet with only ice for a water source and no breathable air was not what humans were designed for.

Autonomous spacecraft that think with A.I. and know exactly where to go, what to do, and what to beam back to Houston are purpose-built for this.

"It's clear to me that if you want to go into deep space, you need to use systems with A.I. which can decide things for themselves, because it just takes too much time to communicate with Earth," Loeb says.

 

"It's also better to use an A.I. brain than a human brain you force to survive under unusual conditions. Sending humans to more hazardous conditions is not the resolution."

It would also be impossible to expect humans to trek much further than that.

Our rockets are actually not that impressive even if they can zoom 7–8 miles per second, according to Shostak. Mars is a seven- to eight-month flight away.

Going through that odyssey could already ravage the human body in ways we might not even be aware of yet, but biological pitfalls aside, we don't live nearly long enough to strap in for the 83,500 years it would take to get to our closest star, Proxima Centauri.
 

If we can figure out how to prevent these machines from breaking down and keep them generating their own power, their lifetimes could be infinite.

We won't even need to put bootprints on other planets to encounter alien life.

Shostak thinks both we and any other (again, hypothetical) intelligent life forms out there can avoid an onslaught of cosmic rays in a spaceship by letting the A.I. make the journey.

"I don't know that coming to Earth would even interest aliens," he says.

 

"If they're smarter than us, they probably can't be bothered with the idea that they're going to come to Earth to destroy our cities - that's a lot of effort and expense.

 

They don't need to do that if they have machine intelligence."

If we send an A.I. probe of our own to a planet fathomless light years away, it is possible that the beings it communicates with will have thought "they were the only intelligent life out there" up until that point.

They might experience the same shock Loeb thinks we will.

Then, we will be the aliens...!