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IPFS News Link • Robots and Artificial Intelligence

The Dominant Life Form in the Cosmos Is Probably Superintelligent Robots

• http://motherboard.vice.com-MADDIE STONE

While scores of philosophers, scientists and futurists have prophesied the rise of artificial intelligence and the impending singularity, most have restricted their predictions to Earth. Fewer thinkers—outside the realm of science fiction, that is—have considered the notion that artificial intelligence is already out there, and has been for eons.

Susan Schneider, a professor of philosophy at the University of Connecticut, is one who has. She joins a handful of astronomers, including Seth Shostak, director of NASA's Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or SETI, program, NASA AstrobiologistPaul Davies, and Library of Congress Chair in Astrobiology Stephen Dick in espousing the view that the dominant intelligence in the cosmos is probably artificial. In her paper "Alien Minds," written for a forthcoming NASA publication, Schneider describes why alien life forms are likely to be synthetic, and how such creatures might think.

"Most people have an iconic idea of aliens as these biological creatures, but that doesn't make any sense from a timescale argument," Shostak told me. "I've bet dozens of astronomers coffee that if we pick up an alien signal, it'll be artificial life."

With the latest updates from NASA's Kepler mission showing potentially habitable worlds strewn across the galaxy, it's becoming harder and harder to assert that we're alone in the universe. And if and when we do encounter intelligent life forms, we'll want to communicate with them, which means we'll need some basis for understanding their cognition.


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