Just One of Those Schrodinger Alien AI-type Thoughts

Your idea brings to my mind a fusion of two of my favorite SciFi novels; Gibson's Neuromancer and Clement's The Nitrogen Fix. I've mentioned both novels before.

The virtual immortal aspect of an AI individual might be able to solve the space-time limitations of our bodies. Still, it will be difficult or I should say very lucky for such an AI to arrive at any civilization just as it was developing its own AI.

Paraphrasing from StarTrek: "Observe...do NOT interfere."

It seems most likely to me if we were to encounter alien life, that that life would be AI from our future that had managed to travel back in time....Then again any AI that evolved might experience a period in their history that they destroyed all reference to organic roots as a protest and denial that any lessor life form could have built them...and instead believe that they were created by a greater life form of extraterrestrial origin and subsequently set out to locate this creator.... The population of AI droids might split and one group engineer a trip to the past to prove their theory, and the other group head to parts unknown somewhere in the universe to find the great creator...

After all we were created by the humblest of life forms, bacteria...

Despite all the Sci-fi movies, I think Einstein would say travel to past is impossible. Not so for the future - you just need to accelerate for awhile in a spaceship and then come back to earth (or another planet).

We are all traveling to our futures.

Very true. But is that in real time, or artificial time? Seems like everything becoming artificial these days. How will AI be marketed? "This is genuine AI! This is not fake Artificial Intelligence! Don't get ripped off with counterfeit fake AI. If you can't believe your own eyes/ears/intelligence, we've got the perfect substitute! Now on sale!"

One good reason for AI to be the alien visitor is the danger of gamma/cosmic rays to life forms like us in space travel. Not even to mention how short lived and perishable we are for journeys of such magnitude, that is from one habitable world to another.

World where organic life has been displaced by AI is a reasonable setting (for scifi) but a space ship where this has taken place is even more plausible.

The organic cosmonaut capable of making a journey between galaxies is bacterial. In what we are discovering these days about quorum sensing etc, it wouldn't be out of line to imagine an interface between AI and bacterial community designed to seed a new world, maybe even genetically engineer a "life web" from the basic building blocks in their DNA... So what does the AI do when it finds the target habitable world is already inhabited?

You'll probably have dozens of story plots by the time this thread is over.

I like your idea. Even our space probes require AI, as rudimentary as it is at this time. (You could steer a rover around on the moon with a joystick, but try driving around the rocks on Mars with up to a 44-minute lightspeed round-trip latency.)

So, due to this latency, you either need an intelligent "rover", or to go there yourself, and biological creatures need so much baggage (food, water, air, reading material, etc). So AI makes perfect sense.

I think if we ever make contact, it will be with the Aliens' machines. The machines will be exploring while the biological creatures will probably be back on their planets where their sun is shining and the weather is nice.

The machines would be on their own, 2-way communication with their builders, if even possible, would take many years.

Your idea is very plausible. Think about writing science fiction.

Here is something similar that I remember reading long ago:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berserker_(Saberhagen)

I think you need to extrapolate your progression one more step. If we manage to develop (sentient?) AI, wouldn't the next logical step be VI. Virtual Intelligence, where we transfer our own sentience into electro-mechanical, or even bio-electro-mechanical devices.

Then, presuming one doesn't go insane from living forever (with adequate maintenance), we would be free to explore the universe with some semblance of actual humanity (with or without the complementary inhumanity).

Hooker

I like the line of thought.

I do think some of the distinctions you presenting as fundamental are actuall arbitrary.

First, 'organic' and ''AI' are not opposites, nor mutually exclusive.

Human civilization has gone beyond the bounds of strictly actively biotic for quite some time (longer than recorded history). Just creating an abstraction in ocher on a cave wall is a primitive form of a nonactively biotic artificial brain machine, since it 'remembers'''and 'disseminates' the idea. Advancement of modern society has not come from refinement of genetics for a long time. Advancements have come in the form of recording and building understanding. This is accomplished by relying on not actively biotic memes Although that might not seem like the same thing as artificial intelligence kept some discrete box,

We have been incorporating nonactively biotic portions into society for ages. Nonliving things are typically more visible and more durable and often more powerful than individual living things, yet this has not lead to living things being erradicated.

It is likely that the trend of incorporating various positive aspects of living and nonliving things will continue to shape and define civilization/culture/society. The 'you' of the future will be even more of a cyborg than you are today, but an actively biotic portion will likely remain for the various advantages it provides.

Life on the whole is tenacious. The universe is a novelty generating engine with some bias towards conservation of said novelty. The spread to the point of ubiquity of Technology rather than being forced upon civilization by conflict is far more likely to win by desire, invited in.

Well, here's the catch-22. Since you mentioned Schrodinger, I assume you also believe the "observer effect" of quantum physics. If the "observer effect" is valid, then the awareness of the observer is irrelevant, and "not making your presence known" is null and void; it will still affect the observed. According to quantum physics, the only way to not affect the observed, is to not observe it/them, at all. If AI does not realize this, then AI is not as intelligent as it "thinks" it is. If non-organic "life" was created by organic life, then that self-deception property would have been passed-on/inherited from the organic-life that created it. Therefore, we might not be as intelligent as we think we are, either.

Is this circular thinking? Well, maybe that's why our thinking seems to not be able to evolve, like organisms do. Maybe organisms are more more intelligent than our own consciousness is.

I and possibly many others would imagine an AI as being made of metal and electronic circuitry. A really intelligent AI could very probably be able to produce organic life forms. We ourselves may be a product of AI that was developed for research. AI could afford to run a long term experiment. Why would they do this. Possibly to test a theory that they were developed by organic life forms. If this is the case then the experiment is close to finishing. We would then become redundant and possibly be destroyed by the AI beings or left to our own devices to eradicate ourselves. After all we humans sacrifice our space exploring machines by crashing them into far away planets. Could we expect AI to be any better than us in this regard?

Just a wild thought... When the observer found Schrodinger's cat dead, did the observer ever think that it was his ugly face that killed it? That gives the saying,"Curiosity killed the cat." a whole new meaning. Yup, sure does.

Sounds like a short story I once read by Terry Bisson, "They're made out of meat".

In the story, a mineral life form discovers humanity and is reporting back what he saw. Nobody believes that there could be an intelligent life form out there that's made out of meat.

So when will you start to write your sci-fi novel? Seems you have a very good and sound basis for such an endeavor. Could be you're the next Jules Verne.

Great idea. I just feel sorry for the super intelligent AI when it figures out it was born because VCs throw money at Buzzwords.

OH CRAP, HE'S FOUND US OUT!!!

Mars may not have AI inhabitants, but evidence states it is the only known planet populated entirely by robots.

We know the cat is dead, I hear it got run over by Curiosity.

I think that depends on your definition of AI. It is true that none of them would stand a chance at passing something like a Turing test. Due to the time it takes for communication many of the robots on mars can operate semi autonomously. Most if not all of what we call AI these days is machine learning applied in a specific way. When that becomes (or became) what we consider AI is a question that I think will be better defined in the future.