An aliens analogy is explicitly relying on [we have no idea what this will do]. It’s easy to imagine friendly aliens, just as it’s easy to imagine unfriendly ones, or entirely disinterested ones. The analogy is unlikely to lead to a highly specific, incorrect model.
As a matter of fact I think the word “alien” often evokes a fairly specific caricature that is separate from “something that’s generically different and hard to predict”. But it’s obviously hard for me to prove what’s going on in people’s minds, so I’ll just say what tends to flashes in my mind when I think of aliens:
Beings who have no shared history with us, as they were created under a completely separate evolutionary history
A Hollywood stock image of an alien species that is bent on some goal, such as extermination (i.e. rapacious creatures who will stop at nothing to achieve something)
A being that does not share our social and cultural concepts
I think these things are often actually kind of being jammed into the analogy, intended or not, and the question of how much future AIs will share these properties is still an open question. I think we should not merely assume these things.
As a matter of fact I think the word “alien” often evokes a fairly specific caricature that is separate from “something that’s generically different and hard to predict”. But it’s obviously hard for me to prove what’s going on in people’s minds, so I’ll just say what tends to flashes in my mind when I think of aliens:
Beings who have no shared history with us, as they were created under a completely separate evolutionary history
A Hollywood stock image of an alien species that is bent on some goal, such as extermination (i.e. rapacious creatures who will stop at nothing to achieve something)
A being that does not share our social and cultural concepts
I think these things are often actually kind of being jammed into the analogy, intended or not, and the question of how much future AIs will share these properties is still an open question. I think we should not merely assume these things.