Related papers: The SETI Paradox
Recent progress in artificial intelligence (AI) has drawn attention to the technology's transformative potential, including what some see as its prospects for causing large-scale harm. We review two influential arguments purporting to show…
High-energy astrophysical events that cause galaxy-scale extinctions have been proposed as a way to explain or mollify the Fermi Paradox, by making the universe at earlier times more dangerous for evolving life, and reducing its present-day…
The recent wave of generative AI has sparked unprecedented global attention, with both excitement and concern over potentially superhuman levels of artificial intelligence: models now take only seconds to produce outputs that would…
The search for technosignatures from hypothetical galactic civilizations is going through a new phase of intense activity. For the first time, a significant fraction of the vast search space is expected to be sampled in the foreseeable…
The discovery of ubiquitous habitable extrasolar planets, combined with revolutionary advances in instrumentation and observational capabilities, has ushered in a renaissance in the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence (SETI). Large…
Rapid advances in artificial intelligence necessitate a re-examination of the epistemological foundations upon which we attribute consciousness. As AI systems increasingly mimic human behavior and interaction with high fidelity, the concept…
There is both much optimism and pessimism around artificial intelligence (AI) today. The optimists are investing millions of dollars, and even in some cases billions of dollars into AI. The pessimists, on the other hand, predict that AI…
I distinguish between pure self-locating credences and superficially self-locating credences, and argue that there is never any rationally compelling way to assign pure self-locating credences. I first argue that from a practical point of…
While humanity has not yet observed any extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI), contact with ETI remains possible. Contact could occur through a broad range of scenarios that have varying consequences for humanity. However, many discussions of…
Agents' judgment depends on perception and previous knowledge. Assuming that previous knowledge depends on perception, we can say that judgment depends on perception. So, if judgment depends on perception, can agents judge that they have…
Interstellar signals might be intermittent for many reasons, such as targeted sequential transmissions, or isotropic broadcasts that are not on continuously, or many other reasons. The time interval between such signals would be important,…
What would SETI Beacon transmitters be like if built by civilizations with a variety of motivations, but who cared about cost? We studied in a companion paper how, for fixed power density in the far field, we could build a cost-optimum…
The Search for Extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) is a scientific and cultural effort seeking evidence of intelligent life beyond earth. Radio SETI observes the radio spectrum for ''technosignatures" that could be produced by an advanced…
Although the conscious state is considered an emergent property of the underlying brain activity and thus somehow resides on brain hardware, there is a non-univocal mapping between both. Given a neural hardware, multiple conscious patterns…
Explainability and comprehensibility of AI are important requirements for intelligent systems deployed in real-world domains. Users want and frequently need to understand how decisions impacting them are made. Similarly it is important to…
The field of AI alignment aims to steer AI systems toward human goals, preferences, and ethical principles. Its contributions have been instrumental for improving the output quality, safety, and trustworthiness of today's AI models. This…
The modern search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) began with the seminal publications of Cocconi & Morrison (1959) and Schwartz & Townes (1961), who proposed to search for narrow-band signals in the radio spectrum, and for optical…
In this article, I will explore the nature of interference in translation, especially in technical and scientific texts, using a descriptivist approach. I will have a brief overview of the historical excursion of interference in technical…
It is often thought that the existence of other worlds cannot be scientifically verified and therefore should be treated as philosophical speculation. In this article, I describe several methods for determining if other worlds exist, even…
Gray (2015) argued that the Fermi paradox (FP) is a misnomer, and it is not a valid paradox. Gray also speculated that the argument was misattributed to Fermi, whose lunchtime remarks did not pertain to the existence of extraterrestrial…