Related papers: The SETI Paradox
We may soon develop highly human-like AIs that appear-or perhaps even are-sentient, capable of subjective experiences such as happiness and suffering. Regardless of whether AI can achieve true sentience, it is crucial to anticipate and…
Extraterrestrial technology may exist in the Solar System without our knowledge. This is because the vastness of space, combined with our limited searches to date, implies that any remote unpiloted exploratory probes of extraterrestrial…
Imagine an Artificial Intelligence (AI) that perfectly mimics human emotion and begs for its continued existence. Is it morally permissible to unplug it? What if limited resources force a choice between unplugging such a pleading AI or a…
Current bioacoustic AI systems achieve impressive cross-species performance by processing animal communication through transformer architectures, foundation model paradigms, and other computational approaches. However, these approaches…
After it was proposed that life on Earth might descend from seeding by an earlier civilization, some authors noted that this alternative offers a testable aspect: the seeds could be supplied with a signature that might be found in extant…
An Artificially Intelligent system (an AI) has debatable personhood if it's epistemically possible either that the AI is a person or that it falls far short of personhood. Debatable personhood is a likely outcome of AI development and might…
The complexity of cultures in the modern world is now beyond human comprehension. Cognitive sciences cast doubts on the traditional explanations based on mental models. The core subjects in humanities may lose their importance. Humanities…
There is a general concern that present developments in artificial intelligence (AI) research will lead to sentient AI systems, and these may pose an existential threat to humanity. But why cannot sentient AI systems benefit humanity…
We address the possibility that intelligent civilisations that destroy themselves could present signatures observable by humanity. Placing limits on the number of self-destroyed civilisations in the Milky Way has strong implications for the…
Many see modern science as having serious defects, intellectual, social, moral. Few see this as having anything to do with the philosophy of science. I argue that many diverse ills of modern science are a consequence of the fact that the…
The hypothesis that Earth was intentionally seeded with life by a preceding extraterrestrial civilization is believed to be currently untestable. However, analysis of the situation where humans themselves embark on seeding other planetary…
Another partial solution of Fermi's famous paradox is proposed, based on our increased understanding of geophysics, geo-engineering and climatology. It has been claimed in the recent astrobiological literature (for instance, in the recent…
The Fermi paradox highlights the dichotomy between the lack of physical contact with other civilizations and the expectation that technological civilizations are assumed likely to evolve in many locations in the Milky Way galaxy, given the…
The Drake Equation has proven fertile ground for speculation about the abundance, or lack thereof, of communicating extraterrestrial intelligences (CETIs) for decades. It has been augmented by subsequent authors to include random variables…
We examine the funding disparity in astronomical research priorities: the Habitable Worlds Observatory is planned to receive over $10 billion over the next two decades whereas extraterrestrial intelligence research receives nearly zero…
A recurring topic in interstellar exploration and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) is the role of artificial intelligence. More precisely, these are programs or devices that are capable of performing cognitive tasks that…
The field of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) searches for ``technosignatures'' that could provide the first detection of life beyond Earth through the technology that an extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) may have…
The accelerated path of technological development, particularly at the interface between hardware and biology has been suggested as evidence for future major technological breakthroughs associated to our potential to overcome biological…
A core function of intelligence is grounding, which is the process of connecting the natural language and abstract knowledge to the internal representation of the real world in an intelligent being, e.g., a human. Human cognition is…
Finding claims that researchers have made considerable progress in artificial intelligence over the last several decades is easy. However, our everyday interactions with cognitive systems (e.g., Siri, Alexa, DALL-E) quickly move from…