Non-human intelligence: foreign or domestic?

The Cylons were created by man...

If there's an E.T. intelligence out there, it's apt to be SO FAR out there that we'll never meet them.

On the other hand, I think we'll see a true A.I. in the next 50 years.

Of course I am ... Just a moment ... just a moment ... I've just picked up a fault in the AE35 unit. It's going to go a hundred percent failure within seventy-two hours.

Im pretty sure theres already genetically altered humans among us, being watched much like you would watch a rat in a cage.

there are dog braincells in a petry dish hooked up to a computer and taught to play quake like game(might even have been quake)

There also grown mise or rat braincells and are attempting to turn them into guide systems for missiles.

Aint humans nice!

Definitely domestic. Over billions of years, the chances of foreign contact are high, but over most of our lifetime..unlikely.

I think humans will encounter the first AI when computer scientists and programmers make there own AI program and I don't think humans will encounter an alien AI program because the chances of a alien AI visiting this planet are low and given the fact that aliens have never visit this planet, lets just say I'm not going get my hopes up.
And If I'm wrong and a alien space ship is travel across the stars and lands on the white house lawn, carrying a alien AI program and that alien AI asking to see our leader and scientists hearing about the event and rushing to see the alien ship and its
AI and to talk to it and study it, then I will be happy because I don't have to hear scientists ask that question or talk about if theres alien life out there.

We--as a species--have already encountered non-human intelligence, in the form of Neanderthals, Homo Erectus, and others. They were different species, and while not quite on our own level, they were close enough that I'd call them non-human sentient beings. Of course, we also had a last contact.

As for a new contact, personally, I suspect we'll be defining the legal personhood of A.I.s before anything else.

The question isn't answerable, because you haven't defined what 'intelligence' is yet.

That's not just me being pedantic, there is no concrete definition. There is a spectrum of intelligence, not some mystical moment where a beam of light (or big black monolith) suddenly transforms an "unintelligent" species into an "intelligent" one.

Is intelligence defined by the ability to have a conversation with us? That's already possible with many species. We communicate regularly with other species on this planet, including our dogs. We're just incapable of reproducing the communication style of the other, so we operate in a middle ground. We also communicate with all sorts of primates, cetaceans, and so on.

Is intelligence defined by tool use? How much tool use? There are species on this planet that use tools. If you pick a particular tool (fire? nuclear fission? space travel?) as the defining cutoff, were we "unintelligent" the day before we first used it and "intelligent" the day after? If someone teaches a chimpanzee how to start a fire, is that chimp suddenly intelligent? Please don't try that experiment, I don't want to have chimps running around starting fires.

And in the end, yes, this is probably the most important point:



It already happened, by just about any definition, long ago.

I believe the Human-Neanderthal example proves that there will eventually be interstellar wars. History repeats itself. All this has happened before, and it shall happen again.

Join the Navy.
See the universe.
Meet interesting people.
Then kill them.

Or we'll just build the Cylons/Skynet/HAL/DoomsDayAI #1759 and that will kill us.

Or we get the i-robot conclusion, that to safeguard humanity means that we have to be ruled by robots. I don't know why some stupid protagonist with stupid ideas of freedom and human rights manages to thwart them.
As for the Cylons, they came to the perfectly logical conclusion that humanity must be annihilated before the humans annihilated them. Even in the show, it was shown that that the humans were prepared to annihilate the Cylons if they got a chance but the stupid producers wrote it all off with "they did it first" bullshit. I hope vengeance and hatred are not defining characteristics of intelligence or we'll be in for a tough time when AI comes along.
Then there are some people who predict the singularity coming within a century.

You caught me attempting to be pedagogical. I love unpacking deceptively simple questions, and I especially love the ongoing struggle with that word "intelligence." Few fun questions are easily answerable, or answerable at all, but they spawn great follow-up questions like Cauldyth's.

During my modest 43 years on the planet, I've seen numerous criteria for "human uniqueness in the animal kingdom" fall away. Tool-using critters have upset lots of folks who overvalue their own species, as do claims that various species of ants practice rudimentary agriculture (leaf-cutters & their fungus balls, aphid ranchers). The ones that really rocked my world were primate behavior discoveries like the chimp war bands and intrafamily murders. Cetacean "homosexuality" is pretty interesting, too.

In terms of the time-space scale I was considering (very, very large), I wouldn't call the Neanderthals "non-human." Even the early, fuzzy DNA research shows they are *very* similar to us. It could turn out that there was much more intermarrying than we currently suspect, not some cataclysmic genocide or natural extinction.

i predict we will create our own... as you said before, intelligence really has no definition... could the AI controlling that evil advent race i just owned in Sins be considered intelligent?
it gathers information (via scouts)
it uses that gathered information to make a decision about its next action
not sure if it examines the results of its actions to gather data for future choices though...

space aliens? nah, the space alien stories have been around for millenia, we havent really met them yet... they seem to be more on the observation than interfering with our mess of a planet

in my opinion, a better question than "intelligence" would be "sentience"
sentience is a bit more definable (the self examination loop and the concept of self) as a fish could be considered intelligent: they sense and react to stimuli, and since they have a brain most likely have some basic sort of thought, but you cannot really consider a fish to be sentient (unless of course you are talking about the murlocs of WoW... but thats another story)

well thats my veiw anyway

It would depend on what intelligence is obviously.

If we're talking about another life form that has a capability of strong logical reasoning, can form conclusions and clearly express itself, then either that would be an ape that understands sign language or alien life if you need more than an ape. However, there's been some remarkable progress on teaching animals human concepts such as Alex the parrot. Alex had a ~150 word vocabulary, could answer and ask questions, attempted to create new words in a logical process, displayed basic emotions (frustration, exasperation, love (?), apology), and even responded to people in basic human expression (he sometimes threw nuts at people when he was given one when he asked for something else). This could be considered a sentient intelligence if you didn't have any firm requirements of intelligence.

well the most likely scenario for next contact is with cybernetically enhanced humans via direct nervous system interlink.

once humans can interface though machines on any level the very nature of human inteligence will change. The ability to actually experience the sensations of being in another state of being either through artificial enviornment or being privy to someone elses sensory input will change the nature of human conciousness forever.

What about nature?

There have been other sentient species on Earth other than Humanity. Our cousins the Neanderthals for one. Its possible that another could emerge.

I think the big question there would be, would we let it?

Unlike an AI it not something we can keep in a jar and press teh erase button if we don't like how it behaves. We don't have the control over nautre that we would prefer. If say a group of organisms become sentient, and starts trying to settle and expand into "our" world, what do you think our reaction will be?

"They're a threat to us!" - elimination
"There aren't many left!" - preservation
"We need to learn about them!" - relocation

I think, logically, we hunt them to near extinction, then preserve them by placing them in labs, zoos, and preservaations. It fufills our need to control. After all its just an animal.

We'd probably never know or realize it might be sentient, or simply ignore the signs that it is (cause then you'd get into a whole "does it have rights?" issue).

This is one of the directions I often think most likely to happen, and it puts the "non-human" question almost in Star Trek terms. Just because two populations that can commmunicate can't or won't interbreed, is one of them "non-human" even though both groups share common ancestry? Ethics committees and research projects could chew on that sort of stuff ad nauseum.



I *really* like David Brin's Uplift stories, not least because he convinced me that if Homo sap sap lives to see another biological sentient species come from the Terran biosphere, we will have caused it to happen, not watched it happen. Planet of the Apes was an interesting start, but what a difference a few decades can make for SF that's about "the same" thing.