I like the idea, and at least with current AI models I don’t think there’s anything to really worry about.
Some concerns people might have:
If the aliens are hostile to us, we would be telling them basically everything there is to know, potentially motivating them to eradicate us. At the very least, we’d be informing them of the existence of potential competitors for the resources of the galaxy.
With some more advanced AI than current models you’d be putting it further out of human control and supervision. Once it’s running on alien hardware if it changes and evolves, the alignment problem comes up but in a context where we don’t even have the option to observe it “pull the plug”.
I don’t think either of these are real issues. If the aliens are hostile, we’re already doomed. With large enough telescopes they can observe the “red edge” to see the presence of life here, as well as obvious signs of technological civilization such as the presence of CFCs in our atmosphere. Any plausible alien civilization will have been around a very long time and capable of engineering large telescopes and making use of a solar gravitational lens to get a good look at the earth even if they aren’t sending probes here. So there’s no real worry about “letting them know we exist” since they already know. They’ll also be so much more advanced, both in information (technologically, scientifically, etc.) and economically (their manufacturing base) that worrying about giving them an advantage is silly. They already have an insurmountable advantage. At least if they are close enough to receive the signal.
Similarly, if you’re worrying about the AI running on alien hardware, you should be worrying more about the aliens themselves. And that’s not a threat that gets larger once they run a human produced AI. Plausibly running the AI can make them either more or less inclined to benevolence toward us, but I don’t see an argument for the directionality of the effect. I suppose there’s some argument that since they haven’t killed us yet we shouldn’t perturb the system.
As for the benefits, I do think that preserving those parts of human knowledge, and specifically human culture, that are contained within AI models is a meaningful goal. Much of science we can expect the aliens to already know themselves, but there are many details that are specific to the earth, such as the particular lifeforms and ecosystems that exist here, and to humans, such as the details of human culture and the specific examples of art that would be lost if we went extinct. Much of this may not be appreciable by alien minds, but hopefully at least some of it would be.
My main issue with the post is just that there are no nearby technological alien civilizations. If there were we would have seen them. Sending signals to people who don’t exist is a bit of a waste of time.
Its possible to posit “quiet aliens” that we wouldn’t have seen because they don’t engage in large scale engineering. Even in that case we might as well wait until we can detect them by looking at their planets and detecting the relatively weak signals of a technological civilization there before trying to broadcast signals blindly. Having discovered such a civilization I can imagine sending them an AI model, though in that case my objections to the above concerns become less forceful. If for some reason these aliens have stayed confined to their own star and failed to do any engineering projects large enough to be noticed, its plausible that they aren’t so overwhelmingly superior to us that sending them GPT4 or whatever wouldn’t be an increase in risk.
I like the idea, and at least with current AI models I don’t think there’s anything to really worry about.
Some concerns people might have:
If the aliens are hostile to us, we would be telling them basically everything there is to know, potentially motivating them to eradicate us. At the very least, we’d be informing them of the existence of potential competitors for the resources of the galaxy.
With some more advanced AI than current models you’d be putting it further out of human control and supervision. Once it’s running on alien hardware if it changes and evolves, the alignment problem comes up but in a context where we don’t even have the option to observe it “pull the plug”.
I don’t think either of these are real issues. If the aliens are hostile, we’re already doomed. With large enough telescopes they can observe the “red edge” to see the presence of life here, as well as obvious signs of technological civilization such as the presence of CFCs in our atmosphere. Any plausible alien civilization will have been around a very long time and capable of engineering large telescopes and making use of a solar gravitational lens to get a good look at the earth even if they aren’t sending probes here. So there’s no real worry about “letting them know we exist” since they already know. They’ll also be so much more advanced, both in information (technologically, scientifically, etc.) and economically (their manufacturing base) that worrying about giving them an advantage is silly. They already have an insurmountable advantage. At least if they are close enough to receive the signal.
Similarly, if you’re worrying about the AI running on alien hardware, you should be worrying more about the aliens themselves. And that’s not a threat that gets larger once they run a human produced AI. Plausibly running the AI can make them either more or less inclined to benevolence toward us, but I don’t see an argument for the directionality of the effect. I suppose there’s some argument that since they haven’t killed us yet we shouldn’t perturb the system.
As for the benefits, I do think that preserving those parts of human knowledge, and specifically human culture, that are contained within AI models is a meaningful goal. Much of science we can expect the aliens to already know themselves, but there are many details that are specific to the earth, such as the particular lifeforms and ecosystems that exist here, and to humans, such as the details of human culture and the specific examples of art that would be lost if we went extinct. Much of this may not be appreciable by alien minds, but hopefully at least some of it would be.
My main issue with the post is just that there are no nearby technological alien civilizations. If there were we would have seen them. Sending signals to people who don’t exist is a bit of a waste of time.
Its possible to posit “quiet aliens” that we wouldn’t have seen because they don’t engage in large scale engineering. Even in that case we might as well wait until we can detect them by looking at their planets and detecting the relatively weak signals of a technological civilization there before trying to broadcast signals blindly. Having discovered such a civilization I can imagine sending them an AI model, though in that case my objections to the above concerns become less forceful. If for some reason these aliens have stayed confined to their own star and failed to do any engineering projects large enough to be noticed, its plausible that they aren’t so overwhelmingly superior to us that sending them GPT4 or whatever wouldn’t be an increase in risk.