Avi Loeb confirms AI's rapid data analysis capabilities yet argues it remains "lipstick on a pig" compared to true alien intelligence. While silicon-based systems process Earth-bound datasets efficiently, Loeb contends they lack the vast interstellar experiences necessary for genuine cosmic insight. He illustrates this by contrasting human territorial conflicts with the infinite scale of space, concluding that only intelligence born from the cosmos can unlock the profound knowledge hidden beyond our planet's limited perspective. [Automatically generated summary]
One of the things in the last few years that has become very big is these language learning models, right?
Can AI be used to infer things from data sets that already exist that we haven't basically been able to figure out before?
Is this something you're looking into?
Definitely.
And I do think that it's one way of getting through the vast amount of data that was collected within the US government as well.
But astronomers are collecting huge amounts of data right now.
And one way to identify outliers is with the help of AI agents.
I can tell you that two weeks ago, I asked my postdoc to look into a data set from NASA, and it took an AI agent 10 minutes to figure out the answer.
Whereas when I gave the same task to an undergraduate student six years ago, it took a week.
So we can already use AI agents more effectively than students.
And that will accelerate the progress of science.
Now, you might view AI systems as alien intelligence because they are made of computer chips, you know, silicon chips, and not from flesh and blood.
So when we think of them as being similar to us, it's just like putting lipstick on a pig.
It wouldn't make the pig beautiful like a human, you know.
And so you might say, okay, well, AI is a form of alien intelligence.
But my point is simple, that we can learn much more from a truly alien intelligence because all the AI systems that we develop were trained on experiences here on Earth.
Either human experiences, human content, or other things that happen that are on the internet.
But it's all limited to the vantage point of Earth.
However, alien intelligence might have benefited from experiences well beyond Earth in interstellar space.
And that's a much larger data set because there is much more real estate in our space than you find here on Earth.
That's why I don't understand, for example, how Putin thinks, because he is engaged in a war on a small piece of territory, whereas if he were just to look up, he would figure out that there is so much real estate beyond Earth, it makes no sense to fight over territory on this small rock.
And so I would much rather encounter truly alien intelligence, and I think we will learn much more from that encounter than from our AI systems here on Earth.