Seth Shostak, director at the Centre for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), expects humans are actually less advanced than aliens and we will soon follow suit to create our own super-beings as a new dominant race.
Mr Shostak, along with Susan Schneider, associate professor of Philosophy at University of Connecticut, wrote on his blog for SETI: “Some biologists have sided with Hollywood, and claimed that the process of convergent evolution, a tendency for design to follow function, will ensure that aliens might vaguely resemble us.
“This line of argument, as flattering as it is, misses the boat.
“More likely is that most advanced alien civilisations will be a special kind of AI called ‘superintelligence’ – synthetic cognition that vastly exceeds the best that humans can manage in every category: social skills, general wisdom, scientific creativity, and so on.”
He expects humans to follow this pattern of creating a race of super-beings in the form of AI which will be “the most transformative event of the 21st century, or perhaps of any century in human history”.