There is a long history of self-delusion that we are at the top of the food chain. This includes the belief that Earth is at the physical center of the Universe and that the Universe was designed to include humans. However, since the 1960s, cosmologists have realized that carbon and oxygen were not included in the initial conditions of the Universe and were only added by nuclear fusion in the interiors of stars hundreds of millions of years after the Big Bang. The carbon-based chemistry of life-as-we-know-it in liquid water is, therefore, an afterthought, an unplanned pregnancy of an adult Universe that could not have given birth to life as a baby.
The human species arrived at Earth in the last part of ten thousand of cosmic history, equivalent to the last ten seconds in a full day. We are not at the physical center, and we arrived at the end of the party, so the party is not about us.
When I started my career in astrophysics forty years ago, it was common to consider the existence of Earth-mass exoplanets as an extraordinary notion. Now that exoplanets are known to be abundant, the existence of microbial life on them is considered an extraordinary possibility, and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is regarded as the fringe of scientific practice with negligible federal funding. The search for microbes is more popular, partly because the possible existence of these organisms does not threaten our ego. In fact, microbes are also featured in our diet.
In the same vein, artificial intelligence (AI) is treated by many scholars today as fundamentally inferior to human intelligence. The leading linguist, Noam Chomsky, argued in a 2023 Op-Ed in the New-York Times that however useful machine learning programs like ChatGPT “may be in some narrow domains … we know from the science of linguistics and the philosophy of knowledge that they differ profoundly from how humans reason and use language. These differences place significant limitations on what these programs can do, encoding them with ineradicable defects… The human mind is not, like ChatGPT and its ilk, a lumbering statistical engine for pattern matching, gorging on hundreds of terabytes of data and extrapolating the most likely conversational response or most probable answer to a scientific question. On the contrary, the human mind is a surprisingly efficient and even elegant system that operates with small amounts of information; it seeks not to infer brute correlations among data points but to create explanations.”
How does one distinguish between natural extraterrestrial superhuman intelligence and artificial extraterrestrial superhuman intelligence?
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