The existence of numerous alien craft on Earth would make me much less concerned about the more cosmic variety of AI Doom scenarios. Any extraterrestrial visitors that haven’t destroyed us seem likely to possess both the means and inclination to prevent us from doing anything that would propagate harms beyond Earth.
Not necessarily. If they’re so incompetent that they have left “numerous” pieces of hard evidence in our hands, they have either limited means or incomprehensible inclinations.
Setting aside the specific scenario discussed in recent news stories, there’s ways craft could change hands through interactions that don’t involve limited means or inscrutable goals. Some examples:
A combination gift/test: see what we can learn from some samples, and prove we’re worthy of joining the interstellar community as they observe what we choose to do with the gains.
A calculated technology transfer, where we get very old junk and then gradually newer junk as our understanding improves. Essentially foreign development aid across a much larger wealth and tech gap.
Anything that’s crashed or that we’ve otherwise obtained, was meant to be disposable, or was so old it was meant to crash long ago. I always assume that if there are aliens watching Earth, they’ve had automated probes here for millions of years at a minimum.
The message behind the inclinations may merely be incomprehensible for us. If I were an alien civ anticipating these humans to one day become something much more intelligent, and I wanted to tell them not to harshly expand without endangering myself, one strategy to take would be to just say “I’m here” in the form of airspace trinkets with the expectation that the successor civ fills in the blanks on priors. To tell them a whole lot more about myself wouldn’t be prudent until I had an idea of what their intentions were.
Incomprehensible messages are a failure mode that indicates insufficiently advanced capabilities. Ambiguity doesn’t help with that message, to the current or to the successor civ.
I mean, yeah, a clever writer can think up scenarios that kind of work on first blush, and are probably good enough for a Netflix series. But I haven’t heard any that actually work out as either intentional or accidental physical acquisition of hard evidence by a small group of humans, who then understand the situation well enough to keep it secret for decades.
Incomprehensible messages are a failure mode that indicates insufficiently advanced capabilities. Ambiguity doesn’t help with that message, to the current or to the successor civ.
You do not understand what I am saying. The message is not for us and so our inability to interpret the message is irrelevant. Ambiguity and in general the small amount of relevant information is an important security property that helps ensure the aliens do not convey more than they mean to.
The existence of numerous alien craft on Earth would make me much less concerned about the more cosmic variety of AI Doom scenarios. Any extraterrestrial visitors that haven’t destroyed us seem likely to possess both the means and inclination to prevent us from doing anything that would propagate harms beyond Earth.
Not necessarily. If they’re so incompetent that they have left “numerous” pieces of hard evidence in our hands, they have either limited means or incomprehensible inclinations.
Setting aside the specific scenario discussed in recent news stories, there’s ways craft could change hands through interactions that don’t involve limited means or inscrutable goals. Some examples:
A combination gift/test: see what we can learn from some samples, and prove we’re worthy of joining the interstellar community as they observe what we choose to do with the gains.
A calculated technology transfer, where we get very old junk and then gradually newer junk as our understanding improves. Essentially foreign development aid across a much larger wealth and tech gap.
Anything that’s crashed or that we’ve otherwise obtained, was meant to be disposable, or was so old it was meant to crash long ago. I always assume that if there are aliens watching Earth, they’ve had automated probes here for millions of years at a minimum.
The message behind the inclinations may merely be incomprehensible for us. If I were an alien civ anticipating these humans to one day become something much more intelligent, and I wanted to tell them not to harshly expand without endangering myself, one strategy to take would be to just say “I’m here” in the form of airspace trinkets with the expectation that the successor civ fills in the blanks on priors. To tell them a whole lot more about myself wouldn’t be prudent until I had an idea of what their intentions were.
Incomprehensible messages are a failure mode that indicates insufficiently advanced capabilities. Ambiguity doesn’t help with that message, to the current or to the successor civ.
I mean, yeah, a clever writer can think up scenarios that kind of work on first blush, and are probably good enough for a Netflix series. But I haven’t heard any that actually work out as either intentional or accidental physical acquisition of hard evidence by a small group of humans, who then understand the situation well enough to keep it secret for decades.
You do not understand what I am saying. The message is not for us and so our inability to interpret the message is irrelevant. Ambiguity and in general the small amount of relevant information is an important security property that helps ensure the aliens do not convey more than they mean to.