“There’s currently an AI revolution, and we see artificial intelligence getting smarter and smarter by the day,” Susan Schneider, an associate professor of cognitive science and philosophy at the University of Connecticut who has written about the intersection of SETI and AI, says. “That suggests to me something similar may be going on at other points in the universe. Once a society creates the technology that could put them in touch with the cosmos, they are only a few hundred years away from changing their own paradigm from biology to AI.”
Earth is actually a relatively young planet so some astrobiologists think if there are civilizations out there, they may be vastly more advanced than us.
“Sure, we got radio. Then we got computers. Then Moore’s Law turned digital computers into increasingly efficient machines, year-by-year. Machines improved very quickly—much, much more quickly than Darwin. By 1900 you had radio; by 1945 you had computers,” Seth Shostak, senior scientist at the SETI Institute, says. “It seems to me that’s a hard arc to avoid.”
In her writings on AI and SETI, Schneider says, “I pushed for agnosticism about machine consciousness. We just don’t have any clue if consciousness could be non-biological.”
But non-biological components could be added to conscious beings. “I’m actually concerned that technological civilizations may not last long, but if they do, there’s a lot of reasons to believe they’ll be post-biological,” Schneider says. “They’ll enhance their brains towards synthetic intelligence.”
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