FORGET little green men, SETI – the search for extraterrestrial intelligence – should seek signals from sentient machines, says Seth Shostak of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California.
He argues that intelligent aliens would probably develop artificial intelligence (AI). These sentient machines will be more prolific and longer-lived than their biological creators and so easier to detect. “The aliens – at least, any we hear – will be machines,” he writes in Acta Astronautica ().
“Prolific and longer-lived than their biological creators, the aliens we hear will be machines”
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Instead of focusing on habitable worlds, SETI should look for places that artificial intelligences are likely to haunt, Shostak adds.
“Provided they don’t destroy themselves and don’t hide, and communicate with long-range, comprehensible signals, they are the likely ones we will observe,” agrees AI researcher Marcus Hutter of the Australian National University in Canberra.
