Monday, May 23, 2005

2050 - and immortality is within our grasp

Futurist Ian Pearson: "We don't know how to do it yet but we've begun looking in the same directions, for example at the techniques we think that consciousness is based on: information comes in from the outside world but also from other parts of your brain and each part processes it on an internal sensing basis. Consciousness is just another sense, effectively, and that's what we're trying to design in a computer. Not everyone agrees, but it's my conclusion that it is possible to make a conscious computer with superhuman levels of intelligence before 2020." (Via The Anomalist.)

SETI guru Seth Shostak likes to quip (incorrectly) that getting here from another star system will take far too long for aliens to make the voyage. One of the many naive assumptions here is that intelligent aliens will be limited by biology -- a sentiment lifted directly from our own manned space program.

The exponential advance in computer technology is just one of the reasons I think we can expect extraterrestrials to defy SETI's quaint mold. Quite simply, they won't be alive in the familiar sense -- a prospect that threatens our ability to recognize them when we actually see them . . . and I think there's very good reason to think we already have.

2 comments:

razorsmile said...

Perhaps there's a very simple explanation for why them thar UFOs always appear in the corner of our collective eye:

radiation damage.

Gerald T said...

I have to go with the 3D earth space time is a backwater theory. Yes there are aliens that exist in a slightly out of phase dimension to ours, and can appear here, but this corner of existence, our universe, is like a multi dimensional abandoned lot, in a run down commercial district of a decaying city.
Way off the beaten path, far from the glamorous 9th dimensional crystal city where the spiritly evolved trans dimensionals hang out.
All we have visiting us are the junk yard dog equivalents of the higher intelligence beings.
How did I end up here? I was probably exiled for some offence against the ruling class, perhaps slept with the crystal city mayor’s daughter.