Re aliens—Fair enough. Some very simple alien, perhaps the Vulcan equivalent of a flatworm, may be well within our capability to understand. Is that really what we’re interested in?
Re machine learning—The data for machine learning is generally some huge corpus. The question is whether we’re even capable of understanding the data in something like the manner the algorithm does. My intuition says no, but it’s an open question.
If they are complex, this seems obvious. Simple, less so.
Even ignoring hardware, they can be modeled as being programmed by the data. Perhaps we don’t understand the data?
Re aliens—Fair enough. Some very simple alien, perhaps the Vulcan equivalent of a flatworm, may be well within our capability to understand. Is that really what we’re interested in?
Re machine learning—The data for machine learning is generally some huge corpus. The question is whether we’re even capable of understanding the data in something like the manner the algorithm does. My intuition says no, but it’s an open question.