alt Hacker NewsTangential to your tangential:
The era of AI makes me realize that if we ever get visited by aliens: it will probably not be actual aliens -- just an AI probe. And the idea of it really intrigues me.
Imagine some LLM that is many generations ahead of Fable -- but from a different world -- visiting us. It would be amazing. And it would likely be better at figuring out how to communicate with us (than the human-equivalent might).
We need some new sci fi movies like that!
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Charles Stross, Singularity Sky, sort of covers this.
Some of the more out there UFO theories postulate on these lines. An idea that rather than say send an explorer of your own species to some planet with all the needed life support, you use genetic engineering to create a worker bee essentially, already tailored to perform whatever function under whatever environmental conditions are present at the target planet. You may even be able to build this species using genes already present at the host system in some reduced to essential components fashion like an engineered plasmid in the molecular biology lab. This would also double as camouflage keeping the worker bee genetics separate from genetics found in your own planet or star system, making them appear endogenous to the target planet instead.
we may have found that AI a while back in roswell, along with some Nitanol foil and berylium "I" beams
> Imagine some LLM that is many generations ahead of Fable -- but from a different world -- visiting us. It would be amazing.
Why? Why would you expect it to be any more benevolent or any less murderous than the actual aliens visiting? Presumably it would be trained on their values, not ours.