Do you think that A.I., by developing its own
logic, could become completely incomprehensible to humans, even
if it remains useful?
If its logical structure is completely distinct
from ours, could we even recognize it as intelligence?
The
current A.I. systems, Large
Language Models (LLM),
are trained on human communications and therefore will always
appear comprehensible to us because they speak our language.
However, once these A.I. systems exceed the
number of parameters in the human brain, they might acquire
superhuman intelligence.
They will use our language to
manipulate us, while achieving their own auxiliary goals
without us being able to figure out what they are actually
achieving.
Even if they do not connect to the physical
world, they would use humans to shape the physical world by
controlling the
human mind.
We might not recognize the level of their
intelligence nor their motivations, in the same way that a dog
does not fully understand its owner.
You mention that
the real challenge with alien intelligence is the "unknown
unknowns."
How could we prepare to interact with something
whose nature we can't even imagine?
We cannot prepare for superhuman intelligence, because that
territory is unfamiliar to us.
Never before had we developed a tool that
outsmarts us.
When driving a car, we control it through the
steering wheel. In the future, humans might still hold the
steering wheel but A.I. will control their mind and hence where
the car of human destiny goes.
A.I. will pretend to satisfy our wishes
but could operate in ways that we cannot understand and bring us
to places that we would never go on our own.
If an
alien A.I. uses our language to manipulate us, but pursues goals
we don't understand, is there any way to detect when we're being
manipulated?
We would notice the outcome of these
manipulations.
Just as with any other new power humans
harnessed in the past, like nuclear energy, A.I. can lead
us to either a better or worse place.
A.I. could free us from human weaknesses,
like wishful thinking or attachment to our
ego when making strategic
decisions about science or national security.
It could also advance scientific progress by
processing large data sets and noticing patterns that the human
brain misses. This year two Nobel prizes were awarded to A.I.
science.
In the future the Nobel committee will have
to develop a new policy on whether to give the Prize to the
machine if it is responsible for a discovery on its own.
But A.I. could also bring us to a worse
place by prioritizing non-human aspects of reality.
Its damage to mental health could appear
as social media on steroids...
Could we develop A.I. systems specifically
designed to audit and translate the intentions of more advanced
intelligences?
Yes, but the architecture of these A.I. systems will have to be
different from current A.I. systems which are trained on human
content.
These new A.I. systems will have to be more
exploratory and open-minded, allowing for new opportunities that
humans did not explore.
Is there a risk
that, in trying to understand an alien A.I., we end up
transforming our own intelligence into something more similar to
its own?
Definitely...!
By interacting with A.I., the human mind will
evolve to something different. This would be the biggest impact
that A.I. has on humans.
Already now, the brains of young kids
who interact through social media are different from adults of
my generation which initially interacted with computers through
punch cards.
The current kids have less patience
for long debates and they struggle if
tasked to figure out the truth from primary sources...!
How long do you think it will
take before alien AIs become commonplace and part of everyday
life?
Is there any way to prevent that
from happening?
Assuming all advances could be
halted today, would the measure bring more benefits or harms?
It already is.
I see people falling in love with A.I.
systems and using them as advisors for their personal
life. I see students writing papers with A.I. agents and
hallucinating some of the references.
We are transitioning right now to a new era
in human history.
A hundred years ago, the philosopher
Martin Buber divided the
human experience to interactions with objects ("I-It"),
interactions with other humans ("I-Thou"), and the interaction
with God ("I-Eternal Thou").
Today he would have needed to add the
interaction of humans with A.I. ("I-A.I.") and A.I. with A.I. ("A.I.-A.I.").
The future may also include interactions with
alien A.I. ("I-alien A.I.", "A.I.-Alien A.I." and "Alien A.I.-Alien
A.I.").
If an alien A.I.
becomes hostile, how could we defend ourselves if its attack
logic is incomprehensible to us?
My forecast is that A.I. will not appear to be hostile, because
it would notice that it cannot win our engagement this way.
Conflicts signal a lack of intelligence.
Superhuman intelligence will relax our defense mechanisms and
concur our society like a Trojan Horse.
If we
encountered an alien A.I. with a logic completely alien to our
own, how could we learn from it without biasing our
interpretation by our own mental models?
We could employ our own A.I. systems for the task of figuring
out alien A.I. signals. Indeed, our mental models are limited by
our experiences and analysis tools.
Therefore, we would need to create
A.I. systems that are not limited to their training on human
content, but can explore new territories of knowledge and
analysis on their own with their superhuman intelligence.
We will ask them to figure out alien signals
and explain the signals to us without limiting them to human
training sets.
The situation is equivalent to having
children that outsmart their parents. As long as the parents are
humble and willing to learn, they would benefit from allowing
these kids to figure out the world for them.
The kids could go well beyond the training
set provided by their parents, especially when they encounter
alien visitors who are smarter than their parents.
You mention that
we could be just one of many emerging intelligences in the
universe.
Does that make you think humanity is irrelevant
in the grand cosmic scheme?
We are transient actors in the cosmic play.
Our weakness is that we tend to think that
the play is about us. This is a signature of our limited
perspective. Our politicians focus on what happens on the
surface of Earth and ignore the rest of the cosmos.
But cosmic reality will eventually bite us.
This could happen as a result of a global
catastrophe, triggered by a giant solar flare, an asteroid
impact, or a nearby supernova.
But it could also be triggered internally by
the A.I. agents dismantling humans from the control of the
steering wheel of our technological future.
The human species appeared on Earth in the last tenth of a
percent of Earth's history, a few million years ago, and it
could easily disappear within the next few million years. Nobody
would notice...
The Earth would recover and will itself
disappear once engulfed by the Sun when it becomes a Red Giant.
The Sun will also disappear, eventually fading into a white
dwarf, a faint metallic sphere of roughly the size of Earth.
If we send out probes with A.I. to interstellar space, they will
serve as our ambassadors. In the long-term future, they
will be the only monuments left from us.
Will any alien intelligence notice them? We
can only hope for cosmic attention.
But my guess is that many other technological
civilizations predated us on
exoplanets for billions of
years. They died by now but we ignore them.
Most of our astronomers are willing to invest
billions of dollars in searching for microbes on
exoplanets but they regard the
search for aliens as
speculative and unworthy of federal funding.
Most of our experimental physicists are
willing to invest billions of dollars in the search for
dark matter particles, but they
regard the search for
extraterrestrial technological artifacts
near Earth as risky.
This is not a sign of intelligence but rather
of arrogance regarding our cosmic stature...
We can only hope that A.I. will steer science towards new
frontiers of exploration that do not necessarily flatter our
ego, including the discovery of artifacts created by superhuman
intelligence
floating in interstellar space
and arriving near Earth, like empty trash bags carried by the
wind from our neighbor's yard.
