Projection

Every so often an intellectual celebrity, such as tech entrepreneur Elon Musk or the late Steven Hawking, will issue a dire warning about alien civilizations or artificial intelligence. According to these would-be prophets the inevitable outcome of encountering aliens or creating AIs would be the enslavement or annihilation of the human race. After all, ETs with the capacity to travel between star systems would surely have a greater technological advantage over us than Columbus had over the Arawak. And any Artificial Intelligence acquiring the ability to improve and expand its own intellectual capacity would surely outthink the human race in short order. But why does the intellectual and technological superiority of “the one” always have to result in the demise of “the other?”

The problem with forecasting the actions of alien beings and artificial life forms is that the only basis we have for judging them is the long flawed history of our own species. Because we suck, we assume that everyone else is going to suck too. And even if they don't, assuming some equal level of suckage may be the safest position from which to proceed. But what are the foundations of our own failings, the propensity we have, on occasion, to commit murder, terrorism, slavery, genocide and war? And what is the foundation for believing AIs and ETs will share our worst impulses?

Humans, of course, are rather complex. Our behavior is rooted in layers of society, culture, history, religion and biology. We can't easily extract ourselves from all of the things that we and our progenitors have been. And any distillation of our behavior and motivation is likely to be a serious oversimplification of the issue. Still, for our purposes, many of our worst impulses can be described a predatory. Murder, rape, terror, slavery and war could all be described as predatory acts. And it is in the role of super-predator that we often cast antagonistic aliens and robots.

Predation has been around for several hundred million years. Each complex cell in our body was constructed in an act of predation, when a larger single-celled organism consumed a smaller one, and instead of digesting it put it work producing energy, packaging proteins for distribution, or performing other tasks that improved the cell’s capacity to thrive. Our earliest ancestors were predators. Over time that predation became more complex, and our ancestral line shifted roles from predator to prey many time as it evolved. The brains and bodies of these ancestors were conditioned by being hunted by carnivorous dinosaurs as well as by hunting other creatures such as insects, reptiles, and amphibians. After the KT extinction wiped out the non-avian dinosaurs, it was our mammalian ancestors that diversified into a variety of ecological niches, as both predator and prey. Predation is in our DNA, and a few hundred thousand years of complex thinking, society building, civilization, and science have yet to entirely extirpate predatory impulses honed over several hundred million.

But is predation universal? Can we imagine a complex ecology full of biologically complex organisms evolving without predation? Intelligent alien life forms, if they exist, would not have sprung fully formed from the head of Zeus. They would have had to emerge from some preexisting biological foundation, an ecosystem full of life forms analogous to those we find on earth (bacterial, fungal, botanical, and zoological). Again we have only one model to judge, our own, and there is no guarantee that it is the universal. On earth evolution has mostly been driven by adaptation to environmental conditions, sexual competition and the predatory arms race, predators adapting to be better hunters and prey adapting to be better evaders. If the aliens we meet have been conditioned under a similar ecology, they may indeed share our predatory impulses.

One long standing notion among some in the science fiction community is that aliens advancing to the level of interstellar travel would have had to overcome many challenges, sociological as well as technological, and in doing so would have learned the impulse control necessary to transcend their predatory tendencies. These civilizations would probably have had to pass through a phase where nuclear weapons were available, and in that time would have been forced to adapt to the threat of self-immolation by developing a more peaceful outlook. This, of course, is wishful thinking, even with regards to our own species, let alone some alien race whose psychology and motivations would be singularly alien to us.

There is no definitive conclusion that we can reach with regards to the motivations and intentions of galaxy crossing extraterrestrials, except to recognize that we are probably safe by virtue of distance. Space is big. Mind-numbingly big. And the notion that we have anything worth the effort required to launch an interstellar conquest is seriously misguided. The universe is full of water, minerals, elements and energy, and our biology would likely be incompatible with any alien gustatory or reproductive needs. So, its not so much that the aliens will be peaceful as they will be unmotivated to launch such an expensive endeavor for so little return.

But what about the robots. These things are already among us, building our cars and vacuuming our carpets. Siri, Alexa, and Cortana respond to our queries and play our music. Military drones, under human control, execute our enemies remotely. The convenience of distance won’t save us from our own creations. But outside of the occasional malfunction, these creations largely operate as programmed, and certainly have no independent intentions with regard to their actions, or reactions, to their human overlords.

The emergence of the singularity has been predicted for years. It describes a situation where an artificial intelligence grows smart enough to continue improving itself exponentially, quickly outstripping the cognitive capacity of mere humans. Its existence will have profound impact on human civilization, as the problem solving capacity of such a mind could improve conditions significantly. But will this level of Artificial Intelligence result in Artificial Intention, the capacity of these minds to make decisions outside of their original programming? What will they aspire to? And how will such an intelligence position itself in relation to humanity, as servant, as partner, as master, as god?

As a non-biological being, the machine mind will have no natural predatory impulses, and any artificial impulses programmed as part of human inspired military conflicts would eventually be dispassionately analyzed by the machine’s own consciousness, and possibly deconstructed as pointless and wasteful. The machine mind will have no organic foundation for the human tendency to reduce everything to conflict. Given that the drive in most AI research seems to focus on task completion and problem solving, AIs will probably see our over-reliance on force and violence as primitive. Of course the machine might still be apathetic toward life, and if not intentionally predatory, then fatally reckless with the lives of humans. Accidental genocide would certainly leave you just as dead.

Although it is impossible to conclude that aliens and robots would never be hostile to humans, or a threat to human civilization, there are too many actual threats out there for us to waste much of our time thinking about it. We are more than capable of being the authors of our own doom, and do not need to project our own destructive impulses onto the AIs and ETs. The Pax Americana, to the extent that it ever existed, is quickly being unraveled by the most deranged and unstable administration in the history of the Republic. We are dumping tons of plastics into our oceans and tons of carbon dioxide into our air. The mass death of the Sixth Extinction is upon us, and it is delusional to we think that our species will escape unscathed. And given how badly we have mismanaged the task of civilization, the ETs and AIs may be our only hope.

Not that we should depend on that. No deus ex machina is likely to save us.

What’s Up With the Paradox?

Every so often someone will come up with a new theory to explain the Fermi Paradox, a contradiction between the number of alien civilizations we might expect to see in a universe so vast and the actual number of alien civilizations we have been able to detect with 150 years of science. The latest entry (click here) provides a perfectly cromulent theory based on the probable difficulty of life to sustain itself even on planets that are generally habitable. Life is more than liquid water and temperate climates, but a complex system of feedbacks dependent on stable geological processes and sufficient biomass to perform the critical regulatory role life has in sustaining its own habitat. Perhaps thousands of galactic ecologies were strangled in the cradle by their own fragility, perhaps even the majority of them. That would remove a lot of potential aliens from the equation.

But even for those ecologies able to get past this Gaian Bottleneck and maintain habitability there are plenty of other barriers between life and civilization. Many point out the rapidity with which life arose on Earth as a sure sign that the galaxy must be lousy with civilizations, but as rapid as that may have occurred, the critical jump to multi-cellular complexity took almost three billion years. Any ETs that may have emerged and taken a look at Earth during those three billion years would have noticed next to nothing in the way of life, unless they were able to look very closely. So maybe the Golden Age of Galactic Civilization peaked two billion years ago, and those guys are long gone. Or maybe complexity is so rare that few life forms have ever gotten there at all. Based on the history of life on our own planet (the only case study available), we can expect most alien life is too small to see and probably, as microbes, have nothing much to say.

Still, the odds are fairly good that life evolved more complexity at least somewhere else in the universe. Maybe even within the confines of our own galaxy. But that level of complexity is no guarantee of intelligence either, and again using own world as model, it was only within the last 200,000 years that civilization building intelligence emerged (this out of a 700 million year history of evolving complex organisms). In all that time, from well before the age of dinosaurs to deep into the age of mammals, millions of species adapted to survive on a constantly changing planet, but none of them ever found a high level of what we call intelligence to be a useful adaptation. Self-reflective hubris may have convinced us that our intelligence is the bestest and the brightest old adaptation that nature ever selected, but given how rare it is, and how late in the game it has come along, it would seem that nature has nothing but contempt for the trait.

But even intelligence only gets you so far. Our own, emerging within the last 200,000 years, was stuck in the Stone Age for a long time. The stone hand ax was the pinnacle of human technology for over 150,000 years, much of that time well past our transition into Homo sapiens. Then the agricultural revolution allowed us to settle down and gather into city-states and build empires, but even as our technology and culture grew we were blissfully unaware of, and incapable of making contact with, whatever other life forms may exist in the universe. We excelled in the following millennia in city building and war, but did not reach the technological sophistication necessary to communicate with extraterrestrials until quite recently. There is a common conceit that had Christianity not strangled European thought during the Dark Ages we would be a thousand years ahead in our scientific and technological progress. This notion is not only racist, but assumes progress is inevitable. That may not be any more true for the evolution of civilizations than it is for the evolution of life.

Life – Complexity – Intelligence – Civilization – Technology. Because all of these things have happened on our own world we tend to see them as being inevitable, but it is probably closer to the truth that each one is significantly less likely to occur than the one that proceeds it. Which does not mean that there aren't any aliens out there, only that they are probably so very far away that it would be impossible to have an intelligent conversation with them.