The Machine Lords of Barnard 68, Part 1

But yeah, it's I mean, it's really worth the watch that movie. Uh, it always makes me emotional. But like, one of the things about it that I always sticks in my brain the most is the very opening sequence where you you're starting um on Earth and you're pulling out away from Earth, and as you get farther away out into interstellar space, the signals that you are hearing coming from Earth, like you're hearing like radio broadcasts or television cast or something, and and it just gets older

and older because you're you're pulling out to where older and older signals are the only ones that have reached that far. Yeah, and of course there's this very chilling moment where you get really far out there and I think you're just getting like a signal of Hitler reading a speech or something that's just like, oh god, And it really makes you think about what kind of impression humanity is making on the broader galaxy. Yeah, I I

specifically remember this this from the film. Yeah, it makes makes quite an impression and makes you, yeah, a little reflective on the on on human civilization itself. And and and if anyone's receiving these signals, anything is receiving these signals, what they're picking up on and what their impression is going to be of the of human civilization? Yeah, Like, what if aliens the only thing they intercepted and had to go on was a TV edited broadcast of Batman Forever?

What would they what would they conclude about Earth life? That's it's it's a it's a fun game. Uh, And it also plays into some fun sci fi to think about this. Uh. There's of course the Futurama episode where it's essentially um, uh, what what was it? Ally mccuh? What was the lawyer show, Ally McBeal. Yeah, it's like an Ally McBeal s show that was canceled or it's um, it's it's a season finale didn't air, or somehow they didn't receive it. And that's what the aliens have come

to Earth in order to to get. They want the season finale for this television show. Oh. I think that's also sort of the premise of Galaxy Quest, isn't it that they see like a Star Trek style show, but they think it's a documentary about real life on Earth. Yeah, yeah, that's right now. Of course, radio signals and so forth, they're not the only things that we have sent out into the void. Uh. We of course have sent machines

as well. And I want us to to think back for a second to the Pioneer plaques, the gold anodized aluminum plaques attached to the nineteen seventy two Pioneer ten and the nineteen any three Pioneer eleven spacecrafts. These were the first human made objects to escape velocity from our Solar System, in the first physical emissaries of Earth life and Earth civilization. I think in the years since, they've actually been outpaced by the voyager probes in leaving the

Solar System? Is that right? I think? I believe so and there's of course a similar story to tell with those uh spacecraft as well, but but uh specifically with the plaques, because of you know, these were of course machines,

they were not human beings. They were powered by nuclear batteries, they had antenna, uh antenna, they had an assortment of scientific equipment on board, so they didn't look like us or in any way really represent biological life, except in the case of these plaques, which include a number of symbols detailing the origin of the spacecraft and then to sort of convey you know, you know, human understanding of where we are in the Solar System and then the

larger cosmos. But then also it contained these these now iconic depictions of two human beings, a nude male and a nude female. Now it's worth noting Carl Sagan regretted that the humans on the plaque do not appear pan racial,

but rather appear very Caucasian. And also the line representing the females Volva was removed, so she's kind of like, um, like a Barbie doll on this, you know, so they're not completely anatomically correct, and they seem to only represent uh Caucasians as opposed to like a the idea of

representing the broader human species as a whole. Now, one of the things that's super interesting about all of this, especially given what we're gonna be talking about in this episode, is that the Pioneer probes and subsequent spacecraft are non human machines that merely bear in some cases the inscriptions of human beings, be they you know, actual inscriptions or media of some sort. Uh. And at the same time, these are our mechanical works, our machine utterances that are

cast out into the void. They are us reaching out four and two other life forms. Now today, humans maintain a small orbital presence, and humans did visit the Moon in the previous century, but our outreach continues to take

the form of these technological utterances. And even though it is the work of human beings on our planet to analyze the data we receive in search of possible signs of alien life, we also use artificial intelligence in many scientific and technological applications, including the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. That is strange. Yeah, and uh, I guess it's interesting on a couple of levels. So, first of all, you know, one of the things humans and we've discussed this in

the show before. One of the things that humans and their AI creations look for our techno signatures, and these include both radio signals and things like megastructures like dycen s fears. You know. Uh so, just as we are reaching out with our mechanical utterances, we are seeking the

mechanical utterances of others. Yeah, we haven't talked about dycen spheres in a while, but unless my memory is betraying me, I think one of the ways to look for something like that would be look out there and see if there's some kind of structure object that is basically only emitting heat. And the idea there would be, you know, if all the other frequencies of radiation are being used up and only heat is coming out of it, that looks like that's probably a waste product of doing work.

So it's like, you know, it's the fan on your computer just blowing out into space. Yeah. Yeah, so, and and basically coming back to the idea that advanced civilizations are going to have advanced energy requirements and therefore they're going to have to harness the energy of entire suns. Now, the other angle on this that that is interesting in

one that I really hadn't thought about. Uh, is that there may be problems with our use of AI for such searches, as pointed out by Spanish clinical neuropsychologist Gabriel G. Dela Torre in a paper published in Acta Astronautica UM. Basically, the idea is AI could confuse us or tell us that it has detected impossible or false things in the data. And our AI creations can certainly reflect our own biases.

We we've discussed that as well, you know, like we can and and you know this this applies to things like facial recognition, etcetera. Like we can we can easily program our own um, you know, uh overt or hidden wants and desires into the AI we create, Yeah, or not even program them. AI can acquire them from data sets based on our own reality. If it's just trying to like read what has happened in the world and

learned from that. It can internalize biases that we didn't even try to explicitly give it because those biases are reflected in how the world is. Yeah. So the AI we unleash on on on such a search for alien life might simply be more inclined to find evidence of it dragging in human bias, or it could simply identify things that are not there. It could find and patterns that that that simply aren't actually there in a meaningful way.

Oh well, this immediately makes me think of what was it called the Google Deep Dream that found you know, dog faces in everything, where like have a have a picture and have Google analyze it, and I think it would try to extract recognizable patterns and then amplify them. So you take a picture of your couch and suddenly your couch, you know, Google happens to detect that your couch is made out of crabs, dogs, and human faces. Yeah, so you know you wouldn't want your your your AI

reporting back and saying we found it. It's a planet. We're calling it Good Dog one. It's composed entirely of dog faces, so let's celebrate. And it's under threat from the nearby crab nebula, not the crab nebula, you know, the literal crab nebula, which is made of crabs. So there's actually a specific situation that the author points out in this paper, and it concerns that the Nalia faculae

of series, the largest object in the asteroid belt. Basically the situation here is bright spots were observed in a crater there, which turned out to be volcanic ice and salt emissions. You might remember seeing pictures of this on the internet. So, yeah, Series is an object in the asteroid belt, sometimes referred to I think as a dwarf planet or something. It's basically spherical, so it looks kind

of like a moon, uh. And that Yeah, there was a big crater in it where right in the middle of the crater there was there were these white, bright white spots there. And obviously, you know, without knowing better and having learned our lesson from the face on Mars and all this stuff, you know, people's natural inclination was to was to pattern recognize out the butt and go

like that technology or something, this is an alien Yeah, clearly. Yeah, you start looking for geometric shapes and uh and and looking for artificiality in it. And so this this particular paper, this this team from the University of Cadiz, they had already looked at what they called the cosmic guerrilla effect

into only eighteen UM. This is this is um referring of course to these uh, these attention based experiments that we've we've discussed before in the show, and a lot of you've probably seen in YouTube clips where you have somebody in a guerrilla costume walk through a scene and see afterwards if anybody noticed it. Yeah, human cognition has

amazing blind spots for attention that will astound you. Now we've already warned you, so if you've never tried this experiment before, you might be on your guard and already

knowing what to look for. Yeah, Basically, the way it goes is like, you can do something like have a bunch of people stand in a circle throwing a basketball to each other, and you ask people to judge how many times the basketball has passed from person to person, and they'll do that, and in the middle of the video, a person in a guerrilla costume just walks through the middle of the group, and huge numbers of people while they're counting the basketball passes do not see the gorilla.

And it's like, if you go back and watch the video again looking for the gorilla, it is unmissable. But somehow, when we're trained in on a certain type of cognitive task and visual processing, you can completely miss gross stimuli that that would seem impossible to miss if you were looking for them. Yeah, And of course one can imagine that if an artificial intelligence were watching the same scene,

they would pick up on the gorilla. They would they would it would be able to say, oh, gorilla, unexpected guerilla has appeared in this scene and then reported as such. And so the cosmic guerrilla effect basically deals with the idea that eve there are intelligent, non earthly signals out there. They could be written dimensions that escape our perceptions, such as dark matter for example, and it would be like the guerrilla suit. You know, you just wouldn't see it.

But an AI would potentially have an advantage in catching those sorts of signals. Oh okay, yeah, I see what they're saying there. So in in this between, in this this this newer study looking at the Venalia faculae. Uh, they did the following. They used a hunt sixty volunteers, human volunteers with no grounding in astronomy. I wanted to stress they're not guerillas or robots. Um. Plus, they used an artificial vision system based on con evolutional neural networks

or CNNs. Both groups detected square structures in the image of the venalia faculae. But the AI also saw a triangle, and when the triangle option was then presented to humans, um the number of humans claiming to also see a triangle increase significantly. So while AI could certainly detect something that we cannot that we cannot see, it might also detect something that isn't there and then confuse us into seeing something that isn't there as well. So you can

see the the sort of spiraling effects of this. Uh. And ultimately, with the aid of AI, we end up seeing signs of life where there weren't any to begin with. Okay, I see, I see what you're saying. So the idea is that humans already have a certain tendency for paradolia or paradolia the detecting of patterns or signal within noise. So that's the reason that we see faces in the clouds, or see a face on Mars, or any number of things.

We look at something that in fact has no encoded information in it, and we think we can extract meaningful information, I mean no meaningful information, and we think we can extract meaningful information. Uh. You know, listening to tape hiss, you might think you hear a word or something like that. And the example here is we think we see I don't know a pyramid or a you know, a building on this asteroid or this dwarf planet, and then you can actually make it worse by if you add on

an AI. The AI may in fact contribute to priming that makes you even more likely to engage in paradolia. The same way that if somebody plays you a tape hiss and doesn't just play it for you, but says, you know, hey, listen for the part where it says worship Satan or whatever, that you're probably more likely to

hear it because you've been primed. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean it's kind of like imagine, you know, you're thinking about Fleetwood Mac albums and then you learn, oh, um, you know one of this, you know, Watson AI or whatever has determined that Tusk is the best Fleetwood Mac album. And you might think, well, you know, it wasn't my favorite, but the AI has identified it as the best Fleetwood

Mac album. Perhaps it is the best Fleetwood Mac album, even though deep down you know it's rumors, even if deep down you know it's one of those early albums

before Stevie Nicks was in the band. Yeah, I mean exactly basically, Yeah, it comes back to that, but it has come back to the idea, yeah that we we're we're entire we're very susceptible to priming, and we could And the argument here by the authors is that you could set up a situation where where your AI dragging in certain biases is setting you up, is priming you to to with it see things that aren't there, which could ultimately just make the search for actual, you know,

evidence of intelligent alien life elsewhere in the galaxy all the more difficult. So this is kind of a conundrum because the AI could it could be helpful and harmful, Like it could help with the problem of the gorilla effect, where we uh, you know, we just totally miss things that we should have seen. But it can also, on the other end, cause us to see things that aren't there. Yes, absolutely uh and and a lot of some of this isn't completely crucial to where we're going from from here

in the episode. It's worth thinking and thinking about because here's the other side of things. What's out there might not simply be the mechanical utterances of biological life as well, it could be the mechanical echoes of biological life, what is sometimes referred to as post biological life, and even post biological intelligence. And this this has some huge implications

um all its own. Okay, So the idea here would be not that you know, we we already expect that it's possible we could encounter alien technology rather than biological aliens themselves, just because alien technology is say a you know, an artifact of their previous occupation of a planetary surface, or a piece of technology could be their probe like our voyager probes. You know, these do not have humans

in them, They're just going out there. Yeah, but this idea goes beyond that to say, well, maybe it's not just that we're encountering the mechanical residue of biological life, but we're encountering a civilization that at this point only consists of machines that there that is inherently post biological. Yeah. At what point does the residue become the thing itself as a civilization becomes increasingly technological. At what point is

the technology the defining or soul aspect of the civilization. Yeah, Now, this is an idea that's certainly been disgusted in science fiction a lot. I think gene Wolfe had had one version of this, where you have an entire mechanical society and they have evolved from advance space suits for biological beings that no longer exist. Uh that sort of thing.

Oh yeah, okay, not to give away too much, but this is also explored in one of our favorite video games that we've talked about on the show before, a really cool game called Soma that is sort of an undersea sci fi horror game that involves a post biological existence. Yeah, yeah, a good connection. I wasn't even thinking about Soma, but but that that is a great example of this as well.

So a couple of sources that we we looked at for this that I want to go and mention here, and of course we'll get into in greater depth the work of Sti's Seth show Stock and the work of Susan Schneider, a cognitive scientist and philosopher. I was just trying to look up Susan Schneider's affiliation. I think at some point she was affiliated with the University of Connecticut. It looks like maybe the more recent one is Florida Atlantic University. But anyway, yeah, she She is a philosopher

whose work we have discussed on the show before. Actually, her work came up in an episode we did about whether machines could be conscious, because she was one of the authors who advanced the idea of a test for AI consciousness that I thought was pretty interesting, and it

was actually very simple. The test was basically just variations on can this machine grasp and manipulate supernatural concepts from fiction and folk belief, such as ghosts and astral projection and body swapping like in the movie Freaky Friday and stuff.

You know, it might sound kind of silly, but actually these are concepts that I think you can make a good argument only intuitively make sense to us because we have a subjective internal experience, and to an intelligent machine or even a biological automaton that didn't have an internal experience, it would not make any sense to to envision something like being a ghost or an astral projection where your consciousness leaves your body, because what would be doing the

leaving of the body? Mm hmmm. Yeah, you know now that I'm thinking about Susan Schneider, I think I saw her at World Science festival at some point in the past. Um, but I didn't think of it till now. I forgot to check my my old notes to see if I had anything I wanted to start with with show Stack though, uh specifically his two thousand tin paper what ET Will

look Like and why Should We Care? And this Uh, Basically, this paper discusses um uh, this idea of post biological life, the search for extraterrestrial life, and it starts off by discussing our carbon bias in the hunt for for for e t s uh. You know, we we look for rocky worlds that contain liquid water as this is the path towards organic life. This is where organic life emerges from.

All of our models are built on this, uh. And and that's that's the softer version of our bias, while the harder version is what what he references an individual by the name of Simon Conway Morris who argues that any evolved intelligent life form is going to roughly look like us, at least in show Stacks words quote in a dark night and from a distance. And I believe

we've discussed this idea at length on the podcast. Yeah, I think this was one of the earliest episodes of the show I ever did, so it was a years and years ago at this point, but we talked about Simon Conway Morris, who I think is an evolutionary biologist from Great Britain if I'm not mistaken, but he uh oh, it was the episode called Grizzly Bears from Outer Space, where so they're there are two very opposing schools of thinking about, you know, the forms intelligent aliens could take.

Some people say, you know it, we can't even imagine how different they could be from us. You know, it's it's impossible for us to get outside of our own anthro anthropomorphic paradigm to imagine how biologically your friend and strange aliens could be. And Morris was on the other side. He was saying, no, they're actually principles of evolution and sort of bio chemical constraints on what life could evolve.

And basically he says, there's a pretty narrow range for what types of organisms can evolve, just based on the physics and chemistry of the universe, and so we actually shouldn't expect aliens to be all that different from us. We should actually expect them to be pretty similar. In uh,

in very dependable ways. Yeah, this kind of the idea whereherever you go, they're probably gonna be things like crabs, and there is going to be something like a human um chasing those crabs around with some sort of a tool that's made to catch those crabs. Yeah. I mean it's been a while, so I'm sure i'm somewhat oversimplifying. Apologies to Conway Morris, but but that's the rough outline.

It is that that that biology is constrained by physics and chemistry and evolution, and those factors are going to be universal no matter what kind of planet you're on or you know, what star you're orbiting, and so there are some patterns we should repeating all throughout the galaxy. So so that's one part of it. But then apparently

a lot of this bias is present. Arguably the show Stacks, you know, argues to this in the Drake equation itself, as we factor in the time it would take for life to evolve and the average lifetime of a technological society.

Now we're called the Drake equation was a hypothetical way of trying to calculate the number of technological civilizations that would be present in our galaxy by multiplying together a bunch of numbers, and I don't remember what all the variables are now, but it would be something like you multiply the probability that life will arise on a planet at all times, the probability of that of any life becoming intelligent times that you know, a number of things

like that. And then I think you would also have to factor in the average lifespan of a technological civilization because at some point it will probably go extinct. Yeah, and we keep coming back to the Drake equation, uh, you know, in not just spend in general, because it breaks a big quest and down into these different factors that you can then, um, you know, work with independently. Yeah,

that's very useful. It decomposes the problem into a discrete set of smaller questions, many of which also we still don't know the answers to. But it is at least helpful to know what those questions would be so they can be investigated individually. Now, the chance of detecting a technological civilization close to our own level of development is apparently small. Chances are if we were to detect one,

they'd be thousands of years or more beyond us. And when we extrapolate that show stack says we we what we tend to do is we tend to base it on our current state of human evolution and imagine something it points out with with less hair, with fewer teeth, with wrestle, with less reliance on physical labor um, which you know, to me this instantly makes me think of like the gray ones, right, and you know the various extraterrestrial tropes that we have, which yeah, are kind of

an idea of what if we continued to get less exercise, we continued to stare at screens, continue to type and stay indoors, you know, for you know, you know million years or so, Uh, what could begin to happen? It's hilarious. The gray aliens are just nerds. They're the nerds of

the galaxy. They're all brains, no braun, huge head to contain that huge brain that can design their interstellar spaceships, and then skinny little arms and they stand around with their huge eyes, poking us with with sticks and going like, oh what you know, what have we learned? And yet with those huge brains, like how many cattle are they going to have to mutilate before they finally figure out what makes a cow work a lot a lot, you know.

Um so, so the show Stack ultimately makes the argument that that this idea should evolve, that that or should have evolved more than it has. And he does this by pointing out that, you know that that our ideas evolved concerning life on Mars. You know, initially, uh, we we were looking at we were considering, oh, the possibilit

be of intelligent canal builders on Mars. And we've discussed where that idea came from on the show before, you know, uh, sort of misinterpretation and and and straining to to see things that weren't there a little bit of that that that bias as well, uh, regarding our some of our

earlier views of the red planet. But then just within a few decades that is forced to evolve when we realize, oh, there aren't canals and uh, and you know, there's instead of looking for the technological society, we're looking at the possibility of subterranean microbes. So our ideas concerning life and other star systems, they argue, has not evolved in a

similar way. Well, certainly not in the popular consciousness. I would say, I mean, at least in some of the astro biology literature we read, it seems like it it is uh, pretty sober from my point of view, and the like, looking for um for biosignatures often has to do with looking for the kinds of say, gases in the atmosphere that you would expect if there were a photosynthesizing organism, which could just be a microbe. And that seems like a reasonable thing to look forward for me.

But yeah, obviously, like when you're trying to think beyond that, think like if we were to make contact with another uh you know, type of alien from another type of planet,

what would it be. I think that we're still pretty close to the gray aliens point of view, right, And of course I should also again point out that this is like a decade old paper at this point, so you know, to some extent, show Stack himself may have helped move the needle, but um he points out that, you know, in addition to the purely organic model for a more advanced alien life form, we also have to consider, you know, the cybernetic what if humans and indeed more

advanced alien life forms have gone board to some extent, they they've augmented. They were their organic forms with mechanical precision. And there are multiple examples of this we might turn to in science fiction, you know, and it's going to range. The Hands of Steel is a good example to draw

on a different recent Weird House Cinema episode. But you have stuff like the culture from Ian M. Banks novels, where it's more of a you know, positive spin on the idea, to stuff like the Borg and the Cybermen, you know, where everyone is majority or almost entirely machine and with only some slim vestige of organic life in there. You know, So everybody's a RoboCop to everybody's a grievous uh, that sort of thing. Just a planet of tom Noonan's

from RoboCup two. Yeah, just screaming for their space drugs. Um. But actually no, I literally do want to come back to this point later on. Okay, But then there's one step beyond all this, and that is the complete mechanical replacement capped off by the birth and explosion of artificial intelligence. So for this in sci fi, one can certainly turn to the terminator model, you know, where AI emerges and then it kills off everything that came before UM and

This is of course very popular in science fiction. Uh, you know. But then another common trope is that the machine part of a society alone survives, so the serve its outlived the masters due to you know, some sort of cataclysm or disease, what have you. But the other way of looking at it as well is it's simply the mechanical utterance is not something you know, extending from the civilization. You know, it's not just an echo, but it is the next phase of its evolution, that the

machine utterance is post organic life. Perhaps the organic aspect of a civilization simply fades away and you know, given these advancements, or perhaps to use that the culture model from Banks's books, the organic source remains, but the predominant shape of the civilization in question is entirely post organic because with with the culture, for instance, it's in his in his books, it's mostly the AI, it's mostly the ships. It's mostly there, uh you know, robots and whatnot. But

the humans are still there. But they're kind of like, uh, they're kind of a thing that is preserved for the sake of of preserving it. You know, they're the remora on the shark. Yeah. That but a but a ramora that is sort of share. You know, it's almost like m You know, at times there's a sense that the robots and the AI the minds of the culture. You know, they're they're babysitting for the humans. The humans are this thing that is nurtured in preserved because they are the

machines passed. You know, Oh, I want so it would it be kind of like if there's a country that still has a ceremonial monarchy but the monarchs have no actual political power. Yes, yes, that would be a prime example. I think so. Showstick also points out that, given Moore's law, the successful creation of human level AI is of course going to lead to even greater AI. Quote, assuming that our own technological time scales are not grossly atypical. This

implies something important for SETI. Once any society innvinced the technology that could put them in touch, once they reach a level that's comparable to our own and become detectable with our listening experiments, they are at most only a few hundred years away from changing their own paradigm of sentience to artific shoal intelligence. This is almost identical to a point that's made in the Susan Schneider chapter that

we're going to talk about in a bit. Yeah, so he stresses that such an emergence would necessarily affect the biological ancestors at all, but it makes sense that post biological life would outlast and outperform the organic. We could therefore assume that any life form we encounter in the

galaxy at large would be a machine. Okay, well, maybe this is a good place to get into Susan Schneider's chapter on this because she makes a similar argument could cover some similar ground, and we can look at that in detail now and then come back to the rest

of her argument after that. But so this chapter is by Susan Schneider, and it's from a book called The Impact of Discovering Life Beyond Earth, edited by Stephen J. Dick, published by Cambridge University Press in and in this book, Schneider has a chapter called Alien Minds where she makes the same argument that show Stack is making here about the nature of minds we would be most likely to encounter if we make contact with another civilization, and so

several of her main points would be the following. She does argue that in the most likely scenario, if we ever encounter alien agents, it is likely that they will not be biological life forms, but rather forms of super intelligent artificial intelligence or s A I. And then she also says, of course that intelligence can take many forms, but there are reasons to think these machines would be modeled on the intelligence of biological organisms that arose through evolution,

and you could call these agents biologically inspired super intelligent aliens or visas b I s A. And there are a number of arguments she makes about what the cognition of those aliens would consist of, But I just want to go back to her first argument that we would be more likely to encounter post biological super intelligent AI than we would to encounter biological organisms like ourselves. And

so there are three main points to her argument. The first is what she calls the short window of observation, and the argument goes like this, once a society has the level of technology that would allow them to come into contact with the rest of the cosmos, and this could include things like radio reception and transmission, rocketry and so forth, at that point that society is less than a few hundred years from changing their paradigm from biology

to artificial intelligence to you know, silicon based AI. And she makes an argument for this based on previous accelerating rates of computation. So you already mentioned show stack referencing Moore's law. That would be in parallel to what he's saying there. Uh so the advance of digital technology. But she also makes reference to a thought experiment from her previous work. Uh and so I just want to read the thought experiment as she describes it, and then we

can discuss pros and cons. Schneider writes, quote, suppose it is and being a techno file, you purchase brain enhancements as they become readily available. First you add a mobile internet connection to your retina. Then you enhance your working memory by adding neural circuitry. You are now officially a cyborg.

Now skip ahead to twenty forty. Through nanotechnological therapies and enhancements, you are able to extend your lifespan, and as the years progress, you continue to accumulate more far reaching enhancements. By after several small but cumulatively profound alterations, you are a post human. To quote philosopher Nick Bostrom, post humans are possible future beings quote whose basic capacity so radically exceed those of present humans as to be no longer

unambiguously human by our current standards. At this point, your intelligence is enhanced, not just in terms of speed of mental processing. You are now able to make rich connections that you were not able to make before. Un Enhanced humans or naturals seem to you to be intellectually disabled. You have little in common with them, but as a transhumanist you are supportive of their right not to enhance.

It is now a D two hundred. For years, worldwide technological and developments, including your own enhancements, have been facilitated

by super intelligent AI. Indeed, as Bostrom explains, quote, creating super intelligence maybe the last invention that humans will ever need to make, since super intelligences could themselves take care of further scientific and technological developments over time, the slow edition of better and better neural circuitry has left no real intellectual difference in kind between you and super intelligent AI. The only real difference between you and an AI creature

of standard design is one of origin. You were once a natural, but you are now almost entirely engineered by technology. You are perhaps more aptly characterized as a member of a rather heterogeneous class of AI life forms, and so her thought experiment ends there, But she's trying to sketch how it would be plausible to imagine humans existing today act really becoming machines little by little over time and

by extending their lifespans. Now, I will say, I do think there's there's value in this thought experiment, and I'm glad we're pursuing it. But I also do feel like I need to flag that I am significantly more skeptical of these types of common extrapolations about trans humanism and artificial intelligence than I used to be. I think my skepticism comes down to a suspicion that scenarios like these make a lot of assumptions that are just taken as obvious,

but I think are actually somewhat speculative. For example, would it actually be possible to increase human cognitive capacity with neural implants that that just seems obvious. It is taken as an assumption because obviously computers can do things that human brains can't do, or at least they can do

them at speeds that human brains can't match. But what if there are inherent biological throttles or gates on consciousness and cognition in brains that make the neural cyborg not much smarter than a human with access to a computer. What if there's just something physically about the properties of brains that doesn't allow you to augment them with technology

like this, It just doesn't work. Or what if becoming a neural cyborg with computer enhanced cognition is actually a subjectively dreadful, miserable experience, and it turns out that once people have tried it and reported on what it's like, nobody wants to do it because it feels awful. Yeah, I'm like, I'm thinking, like what you have, some sort of an upgrade you received made it possible for you to say, well, let's say, be better at personal finance.

But as a result, that means that there is constantly an additional background narrative in your brain and your consciousness about your personal finances. And maybe that's good for for just to you know, your your your pocketbook and your investments, but ultimately maybe it sucks for life, you know, because it's this is not the sort of balance of inattention that makes life worth living or makes it like like

it was before like it. It changes you to such an extent that you want to go back you were, Like part of the joy of life is maybe not thinking about personal finance all the time. Yeah, what if part of what makes it fun to be a human is not being a computer. And if you the more you make your brain into a neural cyborg, the more miserable your life becomes you and you desperately seek to regress. Yeah. Another thing, what if consciousness is just inherently non transferable

to machinery. I don't know this is the case. Some people do make this argument, and I have no reason to assume this is true. But I also have no reason to assume the opposite. There's no reason to assume that you can actually upload your mind to any kind of computer substrate. I think this is just a big question mark. We just don't know if such a thing as possible. Yeah, I mean, I tend to believe at this point that we could create something that acts like us.

You can create something that is essentially like the the machine avatar of who we were, or who we thought we were, who we want to be thought of after the fact. But to the point, like is that I think when you start asking more specific questions about like is that us? Then? I don't know, I feel like it isn't is it? Could it be conscious at all? Even if it could be conscious, is there any reason to believe that you would experience it as a conscious

continuation of your previous mind? Or would it just be a conscious copy of you? Yeah? Or I mean when you start asking questions like that and then you get into questions of like, well, and who I am now? Is this really a continuation of who I was five years ago? You know? I mean, you start seeing all the flaws in this um narrative of self and identity,

and maybe it becomes maybe that's the thing. Maybe we reach a kind of we reach a point where we realized none of it is real, Like there is no real continuation of the self, and therefore why not create like three different machine avatars of my self and have them continue my legacy for me? I just want to mention a few other questions that just popped into my mind this morning. Uh, what if there are actually hard limits on certain kinds of intelligence, whether you're talking about

a biological brain or a computer. What if certain types of complex problem solving within a coherent agent system, meaning like, you know, a single sort of mental workspace that always, that is coherent and communicates with every part of itself. What if there are limits on what kind of intelligence can happen in an agent system like that or different thing.

What if biological organisms in general, even across the galaxy, have an overwhelming tendency to revolt against the cultural transition to machine life and will always or almost always end up engaging in something like Frank Herbert's but Larry and Jihad, you know, where you shall not make a machine in

the image of a human brain. Yeah, yeah, you want to end up moving towards that sort of Star Wars model where yeah, you have all these advanced machines everywhere, but they're only working as servants you know there, Uh, with a few exceptions that I guess kind of prove the rule in that universe. So anyway, literally hundreds of questions like this I think I could list, and they

start coming to mind when I think about it. And while I don't assume that any of them are strong enough to completely disable the trans humanist proposition, I also wonder if some trans humanist and super intelligence thinking is too quick to hand wave past these kinds of questions. But like I said earlier, I do think this type of scenario that Schneider is talking about is plausible enough to entertain as a thought experiment, So I want to

keep going with it. And one thing I will say in favor of of her argument is that, at least intuitively, I think her timeline is reasonable, meaning that I think if it is possible to create an AI super intelligence and that humans or their biological alien counterparts do at some point merge with or fade into that machine AI superintelligence, I don't see why it would take more than a few hundred years after the invention of computers basically for

that to happen. And even if it took tens of thousands of years, I think Schneider's point on this first point she's making is basically correct. The time between when a species starts technologically interacting with the universe beyond its home planet and when it becomes dominated by post biological intelligence, if this is possible, that that time gap seems very small and vanishingly small compared to the lifespan of a

planetary biosphere. Yeah, so you come back to that scenario that show Stack was talking about, where once you're detectable, it's just a matter of time before the machine administration moves in. So one instantly think that you can imagine the the the aliens out there, if they're listening in on this, they're like, well, should we contact them now? They're like, well, no, they're they're about to change administration, Like the humans in charge now are about to hand

off in relatively little time. From our standpoint, two machines that will be it'll be just easier to communicate with those machines and we'll we'll there'll be a lot more pleasant to deal with as opposed to these organic beings. So yeah, I would say I'm more bullish on the second half of Schneider's proposition here than the first half.

I don't know if the age of machines is coming, that's a big question mark for me, but I will agree that if it's coming, it's coming very fast, yes, and if it is coming, we welcome our machine over lords. But anyway, that that was all just Schneider's first point about the short window of observation. A couple of other points that are quicker to make. The second one that

she makes is the greater age of alien civilizations. So here she cites some pre existing statistical work making the point that and I think show Stack made this point as well. If you assume a random distribution of biological evolution across the galaxy, most alien civilizations should be expected to be millions or billions of years older than us. So either there's something very special and rare about Earth life, or we're one of many planets with with with powerful

intelligence and civilization. And if we are, we we should expect to be on the young side of that equation. So if you couple this with the previous points, she argues, you start getting toward an interesting conclusion. Again, these two points are on average, we should assume that other alien civilizations have been around for millions or billions of years, and on average alien civilizations transform themselves into post biological

superintelligence is very fast. There's a very short window of uh, technological civilizations that are still biological in nature. And so if you put those things together, you should expect, Yeah, if we're meeting something, it's probably post biological. And I will say as far as my reaction, again, I have lodged my moderate skepticism about the trans humanist and AI extrapolations, mind uploading and so forth. But I followed the argument so far. Her third point, and I think this is

an interesting one. She says silicon is a better medium for intelligence, at least better than carbon, and this one is interesting. Basically, Schneider argues that carbon based life forms will recognize the inherent physical advantages in transferring themselves into silicon based machines. Again, you know, flag my skepticism about mind uploading, but if it's possible, okay, I follow the argument. She writes, quote, silicon appears to be a better medium

for information processing than the brain itself. Neurons reach a peak speed of about two hundred hurts, which is seven orders of magnitude slower than current microprocessors. While the brain can compensate for some of this with massive parallelism features such as hubs and so on, crucial mental capacity such as attention rely on cereal processing, which is incredibly slow and has a maximum capacity of about seven manageable chunks.

I did not follow up on what she means by chunks there, but she cites Miller from the ninety six This must be a computational science paper. She goes on further the number of neurons in a human brain is limited by cranial volume and metabolism, but computers can occupy entire buildings or cities, and can even be remotely connected

across the globe. Of course, the human brain is far more intelligent than any modern computer, but intelligent machines can in principle be constructed by reverse engineering the brain and improving upon its algorithms. You know this. This reminds me how in in in Banks's culture books, their parts where the machines are working with humans, because you have human characters that are playing an important role, because that that makes it an interesting story. Um. But the machines, of

course are communicating with each other. The minds are communicating with each other. It just blindingly fast speeds. And then when they need to communicate with an organic being, it just like it's just slow as Christmas, you know, it

just drags everything to a halt basically for them. Yeah, that's funny, And it's also funny this last comment she makes, I think is interesting about the cutthroat design idea, where an intelligent machine could just say like, oh, I could make myself better than a brain just by figuring out how brains work reverse engineering that making myself into a

brain and then upgrading myself. But anyway, altogether, Schneider's thinks that these points should convince us that alien civilizations that we encounter are way more likely to be post biological machines super intelligent aies than they are to be biological organisms made of meat. And Schneider also makes one point that I think is very good if it's possible to become a post biological super intelligence, but not a common fate for all intelligent alien species. So maybe not all

alien civilizations go this direction. The ones we encounter are still more likely to be the ones that do become post biological super intelligent machines, because the beings will be better at space travel and better at spreading across the galaxy. Think about the fact that they have no biological risks from space travel like we do. Yeah, show Stack gets to this point as well, that yeah, there would still be risks. Space is still incredibly dangerous, but the bio

risks would be effectively removed. And then since you would uh as a machine intelligence, you would be effectively immortal um in ways that in ways that even a in a you know, a very long living biological organism would not um All trips would be the same distance, all trips would have the same duration, because time kind of

loses all meaning. If it takes you a hundred years, a thousand years, uh, you know, several thousand years to reach the place you're going, that kind of loses its importance. If there is no endpoint to your existence. Ye, Rob nine thousand does not care. Yeah, alright. So in dealing with this question of post biologic logical intelligence and potentially encountering post biological intelligence, one of the big questions, of course, is well, what would it mean for us? What would

what would the relationship be? What would a post biological civilization want? And I guess the first way to tackle that is to sort of look at the precursor, what does a biological civilization want? Well, as a Stephen Hawking and many others have pointed out, if we're to use our only model of intelligent life that we have, which is us, then obviously biological aliens would be interested in

things like domination, resource acquisition, possibly religious convergence. Or if we were to tie the Simpsons into all of this, uh, you know, we could think to the citizen king Treehouse of Horror segment. They might be interested and interested in us merely in order to point a giant space laser at another planet. So resources, yes, but also maybe strategic

location in some greater interstellar conflict. I just had an idea that I don't know if it makes any sense, but I was thinking about some of the some of the horrors of colonialism on Earth. We're not just about the extraction of resources from the colony, but also about the acquisition of customers within a colony for the businesses

in the in the home country. And I wonder could there be some kind of comparison to this in in a galactic sense, like, uh, could be possible that aliens would want to initiate contact with Earth in order to acquire some analogy to customers buyers for their products. Oh my, uh, nothing come into mind. But I'm sure this, this has got to have been This has had to have been explored in in science fiction, especially like like Reagan era sci fi. You know, that's a that's commenting on capitalism

and so forth. Like In fact, she like surely Philip K. Dick explored the this idea a little home that was up his alley. I can't think of one but that that would be an amazing Philip K. Dick theme. I'm sure he did it. Yeah, so again, you know, if we only have to have our own intelligence really to base most of this off on as a model, but uh, this would it would seem to present a rather dark scenario. Though certainly biological aliens could be different. You know, they

could they could just want to be our friends. They could want it that they could have, you know, they could come in peace, as they say. I mean Stephen Hawking, Yeah, he was very cautious about the idea of ct He was like, we don't we don't want anything to do with other aliens in the galaxy because the chances are

it would not go well for us. But people who are involved in set itself in CETI type research, it seems to be more often, I mean, I probably there's a selection effect by nature of the fact that they are part of this effort to reach out and establish contact with other civilizations at least detect their presence. There seems to be more optimism in the CETI crowd to me, like, yeah, less a less of an automatic assumption that the way

aliens view us would be would be extractive. And you know, more of an idea that uh, an alien that as a civilization progresses towards the point where it can reach out into the cosmos. It also maybe matures like it. It reaches its own form of humanism and maybe that extends beyond its own species. Yeah, and I guess too. There's also the argument it's kind of like moving into

a new neighborhood. Do you want to say hi to your new neighbors, uh, you know, the first couple of weeks, or do you want to wait until there's a conflict you know? Uh, you know, what do you want? What do you want your first communication going to be to be? Because non detection is not a long term possibility. You know, they're going to see you leaving your house at some point you're gonna have that awkward moment where do you make eye contact and then you're like, oh, yeah, we

never actually said hi to each other, you know. So, you know a lot of this concerns biological life. These questions and some of these ideas don't entirely disappear when we consider uh, post biological life. But again, the question is what about alien AI? What would a post biological species want with us, what would they, as show stack points puts it, what would they quote find interesting to do? Um, which I like. I like the way of pointing that out.

It's like it's it s to a certain extent, it goes beyond like goals and things that it needs, like what what does it do with its time? Like? What is its purpose? And show stack points out that sci Fi has certainly explored this topic, but he thinks only

three things seem plausible enough to consider discussion. So, first of all, he argues that since quote high speed computation requires compact configuration, the machines would likely remain localized and this would better benefit you know, swarm or shared processing, so they wouldn't be spread out over vast distances. They might be localized into an area only thousands of light

years across. So if you're imagining you know, something like, uh that the post biological necrons from war or forty, you know that they just want to spread out all over the galaxy and take it over like that wouldn't make as much sense because they want to maintain maximum uh, you know, computational power, So they're going to stick to

their own kingdom. Coming back to Susan Schneider, she argues that biologically inspired super intelligences would would tend to have one or more what she calls global workspaces, And I actually want to read her quote on this because I

thought this was interesting. She says, when you search for a fact or concentrate on something, your brain grants that sensory or cognitive content access to a quote global workspace, where the information is broadcast to attentional and working memory systems for more concentrated processing, as well as to the

massively parallel channels in the brain. The global workspace operates as a singular place when important information from the senses is considered in tandem, so that the creature can make all things considered judgments and act intelligently in light of

all the facts at its disposal. In general, it would be inefficient to have a sense or cognitive capacity that was not integrated with the others, because the information from this sense or cognitive capacity would be unable to figure in predictions and plans based on an assessment of all the available information. And this comes into play here because it seems like a civilization based on a super intelligent AI UH if it's spread itself too far, it would

become impossible to maintain a global workspace at speed. It would start having information that was not shared, and that would result in inefficiencies. Yeah, that that lines up, But I think goather well with this. Now. Now, the second point that Stack makes is that given the very short time scale for improvement, uh, it would be winner takes all. The first machine society to rise would dominate at least within a certain volume of space, you know. Going back

to point number one. Um. Now, he argues that there there could be a little wiggle room for some machine civilizations to overtake elder civilizations. Um. But that a sufficiently

advanced machine civilization could rule its fiefdom indefinitely. Um uh Now, But but I wonder if if another way of looking at this sort of thing would be, you know, a resulting confederacy of machine culture is a kind of multicultural machine super civilization where maybe you have the you know, the one older, more advanced, and you know, unconquerable, um, machine culture, but then it ends up absorbing other ones that are part of it, that have some purpose or

role within the machine whole, but are not like the driving force. Kind of like subservient machine cultures, I guess. And then number three, even for machines, he points out space is dangerous and our Winnian selection would take place. Quote, if a machine exists now, it's because its mode of existence has kept this device from natural disaster, or possibly even from deliberate disaster. If such a phenomen gonna exists for machines, perhaps it makes a lot of copies, or

at least a few copies, updating as necessary. It does something to withstand inevitable catastrophe. Yeah, that's very interesting. I mean to pick up on this. There's no reason to say that biological evolution is a process, that is, that is inherently tethered only to carbon based organisms that reproduce, you know, that that have genetic code based on DNA, anything that's subject to survival and reproduction. And I would guess that machines, you know, computational machines, would in some

way be subject to survival and reproduction. They can make copies of themselves, Uh, they can iterate their code. That it seems like those things would be subject to a form of natural selection. Though. The interesting thing there would be, I guess, would would it be useful to think about their code in terms of something like genes, because of course, you know, genes within biological organisms can have gambits to survive on their own regardless of the success of the

overall organism. Right Like, if an individual gene in your body figures out a way to make lots of copies of itself without regard to the health of its you know, to to the health of the body as a whole, it will do that. You know. It's it's the genes just trying to get out there. I wonder if you could look at individual pieces of I don't know what code or nodes or processing functions within a machine intelligence

that would behave in the same way. Yeah. Yeah, So it seems like that idea you could you could come up with a concept where a machine civilization would have a tendency to colonize new areas, you know, because it would give itself room to uh to copy itself. Uh. And then of course you have to think about the constraints about processing speed. It's that run you know, having you know, sticking to a local domain. But maybe that would allow for some level level of mechanical budding to

take place. Yeah, maybe cutting off pieces of itself would actually make it more resilient, to say, infection by viral bits of code. Yeah, well, you know, thinking about it even more now, So say say you have this mechanical

supercivilization and it's again, is staying within a certain area? Well, if it is, if it definitely, if it wants to survive, if that is like a driving force in it, that is like just coded into it maybe from its biological you know, elder creators, then then perhaps copying itself not only within its realm, but in other realms like that is one way to try and survive, not only like nearby rooms, maybe far flung realms, you know, uh, you know, to get outside of not only this star system, but

this system of systems, to get outside of the galaxy if possible. That's interesting. Okay, folks, this is one of those episodes that went very long, and we have decided it is best to divide this talk in two parts. So we're gonna have to cut part one right here, but come back can join us on Thursday for the

continuation of our discussion in Art two. In the meantime, if you would like to check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow your mind, you know, where to find them in the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed and you'll get that wherever you find your podcast, wherever that happens to be if the platform gives you the ability to do so. Just make sure you rate, review, and subscribe. Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio

producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for my Heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows. Letty Propa