If alien life is artificially intelligent, it may be stranger than we can imagine
If alien life is artificially intelligent, it may be stranger than we can imagine
We've long assumed that aliens will be like us, but there's every reason to think they are instead a form of unfathomable AI, says the UK astronomer royal Lord Martin Rees.
From October 2023
We human beings may be near the end of Darwinian evolution – no longer required to become the fittest to survive – but technological evolution of artificially intelligent minds is only just beginning. It may be only one or two more centuries before humans are overtaken or transcended by inorganic intelligence. If this happens, our species would have been just a brief interlude in Earth's history before the machines take over.
That raises a profound question about the wider cosmos: are aliens more likely to be flesh and blood like us, or something more artificial? And if they are more like machines, what would they be like and how might we detect them?