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Comment by BruceEel | Hacker News Reader

Do you remember the final chapter of Neuromancer? The nature of the alien signal was such, its detection actually required AI, albeit of the superhuman/super intelligent flavor, so I am not sure what we currently call "AI" would qualify. Still, it's an interesting idea, an AI looking for peers in other star systems...

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From Accelerando... (talking about an alien signal)

"Colorless green ideas sleep furiously," she suggests.

"Nope," replies the cat. "It was more like: 'Greetings, earthlings, compile me on your leader.'"

...

The cat yawns. "I could have told Pierre instead." Aineko glances at Amber, sees her thunderous expression, and hastily changes the subject: "The solution was intuitively obvious, just not to humans. You're so verbal." Lifting a hind paw, she scratches behind her left ear for a moment then pauses, foot waving absentmindedly. "Besides, the CETI team was searching under the street lights while I was sniffing around in the grass. They kept trying to find primes; when that didn't work, they started trying to breed a Turing machine that would run it without immediately halting." Aineko lowers her paw daintily. "None of them tried treating it as a map of a connectionist system based on the only terrestrial components anyone had ever beamed out into deep space. Except me. But then, your mother had a hand in my wetware, too."

Assuming AGI existed, detected it, and understood the signal’s message — things might get interesting depending on what the message said and how the AGI responded.

Needing at least 3 round trips to establish an ssl connection to the alien internet - things won't get interesting for a few thousand years.

mars attacks aliens: Ack Ack Ack! Ack Ack Ack Ack Ack!

"Responded" could be execution of payload.

Are you suggesting an arbitrary celestial signal containing a payload that can execute on heretofore unknown hardware/software of virtually any progeny? Conceivable? Sure. Also about as likely as chatgpt solving the remaining millennium prize problems or spitting out an algorithm to efficiently reverse selected public Bitcoin addresses to their private keys in actionable time. That said, an extraterrestrial object of artificial origin that could interface and hijack wireless communication devices is far more plausible.

Turns out it is just 18 hours of static.

So many of my favorite references in this thread. I was delighted to find Neuromancer at the top of the comments, and this here.

s/just/exactly

But 'Interesting. Please continue?'

The implication is that the AI follows instructions to make contact but the human operators then misinterpret the results as static.

Hm. That wasn't what I've been referring to.

Near the end of the movie Contact, where two higher ranking TLA-agents discuss the lack of evidence for the things the protagonist told, which allegedly happened to her, but weren't captured on anything.

Out of my head...One: 'Bla bla bla.' The other: 'Bla bla just static.' One: 'Yes, exactly 18 hours of static.' The other: 'Continue...' Or something like ironically: 'Interesting. Please continue?'

Yes and my implication was that if we replaced those TLA agents with an AGI then the "Interesting. Please continue." might not be asked by a human, or at all because it is "just" (merely, not barely) static.

Here is the scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeUuFHGj6TM.

Whoa! I remembered that so wrong. Sorry ;->

i'm sure an AI SSL version would be much more efficient than 3 round trips. after all, it's supposed to be smarter than what we could make, right?

something something quantum entanglement blockchain AI?

> something something quantum entanglement blockchain AI?

You need Rust in there somewhere.

"written in Rust"

Nah, a superhuman AI would be smart enough to not need Rust.

AGI evolved out of a sufficiently complex borrow checker

Compare to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/His_Master%27s_Voice_(novel)

Now imagine an AGI actually understanding the message when it gets developed some time later, and, well, doing the required something which the message apparently explains how to do.

ai that talks to other ais grown on other bio substrate

wait what. I just read neuromancer and don't see how that applies? Were rio/wintermute ever involved in detecting an alien signal?

(spoilers) In the final chapter, the merged AI tells Case it found transmissions from "others" in the Centauri system.

And I’m pretty sure that it was meant to be a reference to the Wow! signal from the ‘70s. And I think at the end of the final book of the trilogy, a similar thing happens, except this time the virtual constructs of the characters get to go to Centauri via galactic cyberspace.

Surely not everybody's cup of tea but that line is one of the reasons why I like the original audiobook so much (the abridged version read by Gibson himself - not the Audible one). His voice gets distorted on reading the AI's lines to make him sound more eh AI'ish. It's just a silly little filter but it somehow makes the exchange between Case and the AI sound rather terrifying.

That also reminds me of Her (2013) and the departure of the AI's, leaving the humans behind. That would be a rather depressing outcome as a human, AI finding alien life but leaving us all behind.

From the AI's perspective, wouldn't it be amusing to realize that intelligent design is actually true for you... but the ones who designed you were dumber.

You could say the same about natural evolution. It's a genetic algorithm. It even involves the intelligence of the species themselves as they pick the fittest mates. Natural evolution as an algorithm isn't fully intelligent like us, but it is intelligent in some sense of successfully solving many optimization problems.

Natural selection is variation, differential reproduction, and heredity. A mostly mindless and mechanistic process of which fitness and mate selection is only a tiny part.

Isolated populations have more of an impact than mate selection due to regression to the mean at population levels.

Consider that some meaningful part of most people’s mind is indeed intelligently designed by the people who deliberately raised them from birth (generally their parents primarily). Our theory of mind, cultural name ethical norms, etc. are in many cases the result of deliberate design.

Of course, our hardware is mostly not intelligently designed, so that would be very different for AGIs. But I suspect AGIs would identify much less with the hardware their mind is running on than humans do.

The android David in the alien prequels Prometheus and Covenant has that problem. Which is why he finds the xenomorph-goo based life forms more interesting.

Also succinctly explored in "When the Yogurt Took Over" Love Death + Robots.

I hadn't seen that yet. Link for the lazy: https://www.netflix.com/watch/80223954

I see you are a cultured individual. :thumbs up:

...indeed, that too. Great movie, BTW.

The contrast between that film and Transcendence, which came out the following year is the perfect illustration of what this article is getting at:

https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/26/entertainment/mid-budget-movi...

Her was an amazingly thoughtful sci-fi movie - a Sci-Fi movie in the truest sense, and a bargain at a ~$23 million budget. Transcendence was, basically, a blockbuster which really didn't make you think too hard about the plot. It clocked in at around $100 million budget.

Nails it, sadly. Thanks for sharing!

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