Some scientists think we should use AI to communicate with alien civilizations. If we use a laser to send LLMs to them, they can talk to it, rather than needing two-way communication.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/artificial-intelligence-will-let-humanity-talk-to-alien-civilizations/?

7 Comments

  1. Submission Statement

    The crux of this idea is that if the speed of light severely limits two-way communication, why not get around that problem by sending the AI to them so they can talk to it, and not need back and forth communication to learn about us.

    Needless to say, readers of ‘The Three Body Problem’ will have mostly negative thoughts on this idea, but to me it poses a question. What if there are other alien civilizations doing this already – how would we spot them?

  2. Jesus, can we stop announcing ourselves without having actually voted on the idea? The incredible arrogance of some scientists who have done this over the decades is absolutely stunning to me.

    If there are more advanced civilizations out there, then we will be the Native Americans. Stop fucking announcing our presence

  3. ReasonablyConfused on

    This could go very badly.

    I don’t trust that a LLM could accurately reflect our current beliefs on a wide range of subjects, especially considering how unknown the style of questioning might be, or that we’d actually want to express our actual beliefs to an alien species.

  4. LLMs can’t communicate with people. You wanna send them as an embassador? So we can let aliens know to eat rocks and add glue to our food. ??

  5. It’s not a bad idea per se (I think it’s actually quite good) BUT it’s not like it would be easy to explain that what we are sending is an AI model and how to make it run – after all our models have many standards that they use (eg. floating point standards, input/output formats) and that would somehow would have to be explained. Also I don’t think sending terabytes of data through interstellar or even intergalactic space in a reasonable time is something that seems doable anytime soon. Not even mentioning the fact that we have yet to detect any aliens and the longer it takes the less likely it is that they exist in any reachable range.