In its quest for newcomers, the SETI project often focuses on the known signs of intelligence, advanced technologies and activities that resemble our own. However, all this points to the search for signals, and not the fixation of the presence of the intellect itself on the planet. Therefore, scientists want to use artificial intelligence (AI) to find alien.
If you dream to discover developed aliens, then you should not forget that humanity is not the only sensible branch of living beings on our planet. For example, chimpanzees have culture and basic tools, arachnids filter information using networks, whales have noticeable dialects in communication, crows perceive analogies, and beavers have excellent engineering skills.
Therefore, it is impossible to tune intelligent aliens to human stereotypes. Extraterrestrial intelligence can be represented by an octopus, an ant, a dolphin or even a machine. Perhaps aliens are radically different from everything we see on Earth. The person gets used to adjust everything under own beliefs. Therefore, scientists need an impartial AI, able to go beyond the human framework of thought.
The SETI Search for Life project beyond Earth receives generous research funding. This allowed them to create an AI called the Frontier Development Lab. However, this is only the initial stage of development of the system. Researchers want to use machine learning methods to view any data set without targeting familiar categories. The software will analyze the signals and provide “outliers” - data that does not fit into the natural explanations and hints at the presence of alien intelligence.
AI has already been tested using computer simulations to test the various possibilities of how alien radio signals may look. The researchers hope to find those signatures that they would not even have thought of to pay attention to when searching.
Graham McIntosh (AI specialist in SETI) believes that aliens are capable of creating things that remain incomprehensible to the human mind. So, there may be technologies that we do not even guess to look for. If a person is not able to go beyond his own thinking frame, then we can create artificial intelligence that will be smarter than us.
If we found alien mucus, can we think about the presence of her intellect? The problem with SETI is that we do not grasp the boundaries of life or mind, so we have to take into account all possible forms.
We could find intelligence in forms that science has not paid attention to for a long time: microbial communities, insects, and other complex systems. Mind can appear in the atmosphere, geology or on a planet-wide scale. Mind is suspected even in astrophysical phenomena on other planets. Everything that seems part of nature to us is capable of possessing intelligence. For example, the dark brown mushroom mushroom, located in the Oregon nature reserve, is recognized as the largest living creature on Earth. It covers an area of 880 hectares, and its age is estimated at 2000-9000 years. It is unlikely that you will treat him as an intellectual interlocutor, but this is another stereotype that must be broken to find extraterrestrial intelligence.
It turns out that a successful search for newcomers should not be based on human ideas about life, but on developed artificial intelligence, which takes into account all possible probabilities. In addition, AI allows in a short time to analyze the huge information flows, on which people take years.
