AI Joins Hunt for ET: Study Finds 8 Potential Alien Signals(blogs.nvidia.com)
blogs.nvidia.com
AI Joins Hunt for ET: Study Finds 8 Potential Alien Signals
https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2023/02/06/ai-potential-alien-signals/
160 comments
Do you remember the final chapter of Neuromancer? The nature of the alien signal was such, its detection actually required AI, albeit of the superhuman/super intelligent flavor, so I am not sure what we currently call "AI" would qualify. Still, it's an interesting idea, an AI looking for peers in other star systems...
From Accelerando... (talking about an alien signal)
"Colorless green ideas sleep furiously," she suggests.
"Nope," replies the cat. "It was more like: 'Greetings, earthlings, compile me on your leader.'"
...
The cat yawns. "I could have told Pierre instead." Aineko glances at Amber, sees her thunderous expression, and hastily changes the subject: "The solution was intuitively obvious, just not to humans. You're so verbal." Lifting a hind paw, she scratches behind her left ear for a moment then pauses, foot waving absentmindedly. "Besides, the CETI team was searching under the street lights while I was sniffing around in the grass. They kept trying to find primes; when that didn't work, they started trying to breed a Turing machine that would run it without immediately halting." Aineko lowers her paw daintily. "None of them tried treating it as a map of a connectionist system based on the only terrestrial components anyone had ever beamed out into deep space. Except me. But then, your mother had a hand in my wetware, too."
"Colorless green ideas sleep furiously," she suggests.
"Nope," replies the cat. "It was more like: 'Greetings, earthlings, compile me on your leader.'"
...
The cat yawns. "I could have told Pierre instead." Aineko glances at Amber, sees her thunderous expression, and hastily changes the subject: "The solution was intuitively obvious, just not to humans. You're so verbal." Lifting a hind paw, she scratches behind her left ear for a moment then pauses, foot waving absentmindedly. "Besides, the CETI team was searching under the street lights while I was sniffing around in the grass. They kept trying to find primes; when that didn't work, they started trying to breed a Turing machine that would run it without immediately halting." Aineko lowers her paw daintily. "None of them tried treating it as a map of a connectionist system based on the only terrestrial components anyone had ever beamed out into deep space. Except me. But then, your mother had a hand in my wetware, too."
Assuming AGI existed, detected it, and understood the signal’s message — things might get interesting depending on what the message said and how the AGI responded.
Compare to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/His_Master%27s_Voice_(novel)
Now imagine an AGI actually understanding the message when it gets developed some time later, and, well, doing the required something which the message apparently explains how to do.
Now imagine an AGI actually understanding the message when it gets developed some time later, and, well, doing the required something which the message apparently explains how to do.
Needing at least 3 round trips to establish an ssl connection to the alien internet - things won't get interesting for a few thousand years.
mars attacks aliens: Ack Ack Ack! Ack Ack Ack Ack Ack!
"Responded" could be execution of payload.
Are you suggesting an arbitrary celestial signal containing a payload that can execute on heretofore unknown hardware/software of virtually any progeny? Conceivable? Sure. Also about as likely as chatgpt solving the remaining millennium prize problems or spitting out an algorithm to efficiently reverse selected public Bitcoin addresses to their private keys in actionable time. That said, an extraterrestrial object of artificial origin that could interface and hijack wireless communication devices is far more plausible.
Turns out it is just 18 hours of static.
So many of my favorite references in this thread. I was delighted to find Neuromancer at the top of the comments, and this here.
s/just/exactly
But 'Interesting. Please continue?'
But 'Interesting. Please continue?'
The implication is that the AI follows instructions to make contact but the human operators then misinterpret the results as static.
Hm. That wasn't what I've been referring to.
Near the end of the movie Contact, where two higher ranking TLA-agents discuss the lack of evidence for the things the protagonist told, which allegedly happened to her, but weren't captured on anything.
Out of my head...One: 'Bla bla bla.' The other: 'Bla bla just static.' One: 'Yes, exactly 18 hours of static.' The other: 'Continue...' Or something like ironically: 'Interesting. Please continue?'
Near the end of the movie Contact, where two higher ranking TLA-agents discuss the lack of evidence for the things the protagonist told, which allegedly happened to her, but weren't captured on anything.
Out of my head...One: 'Bla bla bla.' The other: 'Bla bla just static.' One: 'Yes, exactly 18 hours of static.' The other: 'Continue...' Or something like ironically: 'Interesting. Please continue?'
Yes and my implication was that if we replaced those TLA agents with an AGI then the "Interesting. Please continue." might not be asked by a human, or at all because it is "just" (merely, not barely) static.
Here is the scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeUuFHGj6TM.
Here is the scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeUuFHGj6TM.
Whoa! I remembered that so wrong. Sorry ;->
i'm sure an AI SSL version would be much more efficient than 3 round trips. after all, it's supposed to be smarter than what we could make, right?
something something quantum entanglement blockchain AI?
> something something quantum entanglement blockchain AI?
You need Rust in there somewhere.
You need Rust in there somewhere.
"written in Rust"
Nah, a superhuman AI would be smart enough to not need Rust.
AGI evolved out of a sufficiently complex borrow checker
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wait what. I just read neuromancer and don't see how that applies? Were rio/wintermute ever involved in detecting an alien signal?
(spoilers) In the final chapter, the merged AI tells Case it found transmissions from "others" in the Centauri system.
And I’m pretty sure that it was meant to be a reference to the Wow! signal from the ‘70s. And I think at the end of the final book of the trilogy, a similar thing happens, except this time the virtual constructs of the characters get to go to Centauri via galactic cyberspace.
Surely not everybody's cup of tea but that line is one of the reasons why I like the original audiobook so much (the abridged version read by Gibson himself - not the Audible one). His voice gets distorted on reading the AI's lines to make him sound more eh AI'ish. It's just a silly little filter but it somehow makes the exchange between Case and the AI sound rather terrifying.
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That also reminds me of Her (2013) and the departure of the AI's, leaving the humans behind. That would be a rather depressing outcome as a human, AI finding alien life but leaving us all behind.
From the AI's perspective, wouldn't it be amusing to realize that intelligent design is actually true for you... but the ones who designed you were dumber.
You could say the same about natural evolution. It's a genetic algorithm. It even involves the intelligence of the species themselves as they pick the fittest mates. Natural evolution as an algorithm isn't fully intelligent like us, but it is intelligent in some sense of successfully solving many optimization problems.
Natural selection is variation, differential reproduction, and heredity. A mostly mindless and mechanistic process of which fitness and mate selection is only a tiny part.
Isolated populations have more of an impact than mate selection due to regression to the mean at population levels.
Isolated populations have more of an impact than mate selection due to regression to the mean at population levels.
Consider that some meaningful part of most people’s mind is indeed intelligently designed by the people who deliberately raised them from birth (generally their parents primarily). Our theory of mind, cultural name ethical norms, etc. are in many cases the result of deliberate design.
Of course, our hardware is mostly not intelligently designed, so that would be very different for AGIs. But I suspect AGIs would identify much less with the hardware their mind is running on than humans do.
Of course, our hardware is mostly not intelligently designed, so that would be very different for AGIs. But I suspect AGIs would identify much less with the hardware their mind is running on than humans do.
The android David in the alien prequels Prometheus and Covenant has that problem. Which is why he finds the xenomorph-goo based life forms more interesting.
Also succinctly explored in "When the Yogurt Took Over" Love Death + Robots.
I hadn't seen that yet. Link for the lazy: https://www.netflix.com/watch/80223954
I see you are a cultured individual. :thumbs up:
...indeed, that too. Great movie, BTW.
The contrast between that film and Transcendence, which came out the following year is the perfect illustration of what this article is getting at:
https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/26/entertainment/mid-budget-movi...
Her was an amazingly thoughtful sci-fi movie - a Sci-Fi movie in the truest sense, and a bargain at a ~$23 million budget. Transcendence was, basically, a blockbuster which really didn't make you think too hard about the plot. It clocked in at around $100 million budget.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/26/entertainment/mid-budget-movi...
Her was an amazingly thoughtful sci-fi movie - a Sci-Fi movie in the truest sense, and a bargain at a ~$23 million budget. Transcendence was, basically, a blockbuster which really didn't make you think too hard about the plot. It clocked in at around $100 million budget.
Nails it, sadly. Thanks for sharing!
ai that talks to other ais grown on other bio substrate
> outperforms traditional methods in the search for alien signals
since we have no ground truth nor have we (to our knowledge) received any alien signals to date, I don't see how you can determine performance in terms of accuracy; so maybe they mean an increase in processing speed
since we have no ground truth nor have we (to our knowledge) received any alien signals to date, I don't see how you can determine performance in terms of accuracy; so maybe they mean an increase in processing speed
Well, they can train the model on things we know _aren't_ alien signals.
Edit: From the article:
Edit: From the article:
> To train the AI system, Ma inserted simulated signals into actual data, allowing the autoencoder to learn what to look for. Then the researchers fed the AI more than 150 terabytes of data from 480 observing hours at the Green Bank Telescope.
yes, it can identify _unknown_ signals, but can't determine whether they are _alien_ or simply indeterminate natural phenomena
Or it will identify novel astrophysical phenomena. Which is not a bad thing.
"Guys - we've found intelligent alien life! We have even decoded their signals."
"Amazing, let's send them a response!"
"Ah yes, about that..."
"What is it? Go on..."
"We're talking 250,000 light-years away. Their civilization is probably extinct by now."
moans
"Amazing, let's send them a response!"
"Ah yes, about that..."
"What is it? Go on..."
"We're talking 250,000 light-years away. Their civilization is probably extinct by now."
moans
DO NOT ANSWER! DO NOT ANSWER! DO NOT ANSWER!
Code for the full pipeline including the autoencoder (and weights used) is available: https://github.com/PetchMa/ML_GBT_SETI
Curious, assuming such an signal is found, are there safety measures in place to isolate it from other systems in off chance it contains “alien malware” that attacks systems receiving it?
It's a bit of a science fiction myth that it is impossible to process a bit of data without executing it, or that data can somehow force itself to be executed by its sheer swaggering potency as data. And a thing that is more true than it should be, because people keep insisting that they are super awesome and totes capable of writing C that can be put on the network. If we'd stop doing this there'd be hardly any truth to it.
It's not actually that hard to process data without executing it.
Regardless, it is certainly science fiction that they could guess an exploit from light years away. That's not what exploits do, it's not how they work. I've never seen anything like a "universal" exploit that you could just fire at anything, even a non-human system, and have some sort of reasonable expectation that it would work. Such a thing is not even something you could sketch out. Even if you think you have something, like, say, https://github.com/payloadbox/xss-payload-list , you're looking at a human list. All I'd have to do to completely scramble that entire list is to have a parallel evolution of ASCII where the letters and symbols are in completely different places than they are now. Nothing in that list would work if all the control characters in ParallelASCII were in 223-255, and the alphabet was 0-52, and all the symbols were from 128 on. And that's still a very human standard that is, for instance, based on bytes instead of, say, collections of 9 trits as the base level of the system. There's an effective infinity of other ways of encoding things and deciding what characters have what characters doing what things... assuming "characters" is even the way to look at the representation in the first place.
As others mention, you could hypothetically send a program that does something that can't be analyzed, through sheer size if nothing else, but it would still be an uphill battle to just guess how to exploit something. You'd be looking more at an AI that is good enough to talk itself out of the box, rather than something that is actually "hacking" anything reliably.
It's not actually that hard to process data without executing it.
Regardless, it is certainly science fiction that they could guess an exploit from light years away. That's not what exploits do, it's not how they work. I've never seen anything like a "universal" exploit that you could just fire at anything, even a non-human system, and have some sort of reasonable expectation that it would work. Such a thing is not even something you could sketch out. Even if you think you have something, like, say, https://github.com/payloadbox/xss-payload-list , you're looking at a human list. All I'd have to do to completely scramble that entire list is to have a parallel evolution of ASCII where the letters and symbols are in completely different places than they are now. Nothing in that list would work if all the control characters in ParallelASCII were in 223-255, and the alphabet was 0-52, and all the symbols were from 128 on. And that's still a very human standard that is, for instance, based on bytes instead of, say, collections of 9 trits as the base level of the system. There's an effective infinity of other ways of encoding things and deciding what characters have what characters doing what things... assuming "characters" is even the way to look at the representation in the first place.
As others mention, you could hypothetically send a program that does something that can't be analyzed, through sheer size if nothing else, but it would still be an uphill battle to just guess how to exploit something. You'd be looking more at an AI that is good enough to talk itself out of the box, rather than something that is actually "hacking" anything reliably.
What if PHP SQL injection is actually the 10th component of The Great Filter [1], and every civilization is condemned, sooner or later, to suffer from such a vulnerability.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter#The_Great_Filter
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter#The_Great_Filter
Assuming the bandwidth exists, somehow describing enough mathematics to describe a virtual machine, and then sending a program for that virtual machine, might just be the best way to communicate. A package that can help the recipient interpret it by learning and responding to the local environment. I can't put my finger on any specific book but I have the impression of this scenario coming up in science fiction. I've long figured that humans inventing superintelligent AI (whatever that would mean) and humans receiving an alien signal are essentially the same problem - we have no idea what it might tell us.
Said AI could certainly be programmed to probe for weaknesses in its runtime environment.
However... the game theory on that becomes very interesting, because the sender can't assume that the AI's probes will be immediately successful and they will instantly run out and take total control over the host network so thoroughly that the hack can't be detected. And sending out an AI that tries to break out and then tries to do something nasty is an act of war against an adversary you know nothing about. For all you know, the psychology of that species is such that they will now dedicate every erg of energy to the sole task of wiping your species out until the threat is gone. For all you know, your AI was first executed in an environment that deliberately left some big holes in it and those holes were completely set up with tripwires. Such is the nature of the virtual world. And if the AI does trigger the tripwire, we can also analyze it to find out what it "would" do if it broke out. So it's definitely not a "ha ha ha we nuked our competitors with no risk to ourselves just by sending out a single trasmission" situation.
I'm not saying there isn't a whole interesting conversation to be had. I am saying the idea that the aliens can somehow send out data that is somehow encoded in SuperIntegers that instantly SuperHack every computer that you try to SuperUse them on... that's a bad computer-animated cartoon for kids, not a realistic threat. There is a real threat, but it's more complicated and generally smaller, perhaps with a super weird spike at the top end, but even then, per my previous paragraph, more complicated than I think people are thinking here, because the aliens do not have access to these SuperIntegers any more than we do.
However... the game theory on that becomes very interesting, because the sender can't assume that the AI's probes will be immediately successful and they will instantly run out and take total control over the host network so thoroughly that the hack can't be detected. And sending out an AI that tries to break out and then tries to do something nasty is an act of war against an adversary you know nothing about. For all you know, the psychology of that species is such that they will now dedicate every erg of energy to the sole task of wiping your species out until the threat is gone. For all you know, your AI was first executed in an environment that deliberately left some big holes in it and those holes were completely set up with tripwires. Such is the nature of the virtual world. And if the AI does trigger the tripwire, we can also analyze it to find out what it "would" do if it broke out. So it's definitely not a "ha ha ha we nuked our competitors with no risk to ourselves just by sending out a single trasmission" situation.
I'm not saying there isn't a whole interesting conversation to be had. I am saying the idea that the aliens can somehow send out data that is somehow encoded in SuperIntegers that instantly SuperHack every computer that you try to SuperUse them on... that's a bad computer-animated cartoon for kids, not a realistic threat. There is a real threat, but it's more complicated and generally smaller, perhaps with a super weird spike at the top end, but even then, per my previous paragraph, more complicated than I think people are thinking here, because the aliens do not have access to these SuperIntegers any more than we do.
True, game theory makes it less likely a good strategic first move, but you can always come up with scenarios where a super predatory race has set up the signal a long time ago to target nascent space-faring civilizations to preempt them. If the newer civ gets past that, then the aggressive aliens up the threat level and take more drastic action.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincos_language
I have extreme doubts that we would be able to decode something sent by an alien that looks like this.
I have extreme doubts that we would be able to decode something sent by an alien that looks like this.
I wonder if in the same way you can do statistical analysis of human languages to determine things like which characters are vowels, perhaps if you received enough programs written in some alien brainfuck-like language you could use statistical analysis to guess which symbol is which.
If nothing else you could always brute force it; with 8 logical operators there would only be about 40,000 possible combinations. Maybe figure an order of magnitude larger number to account for idiosyncrasies in their implementation of the language. Running "hello world" a half million times shouldn't be too hard. Of course figuring out which ones are spitting out gibberish and which ones are spitting out perfectly intelligible results for one fluent in alienese would be hard. I presume they'd send a bunch of example programs that compute pi or something similarly universal, but there are a lot of potential gibberish we could fit a pattern to. It might even make sense to just keep running every code sequence in every possible combination until we get something cool.
If nothing else you could always brute force it; with 8 logical operators there would only be about 40,000 possible combinations. Maybe figure an order of magnitude larger number to account for idiosyncrasies in their implementation of the language. Running "hello world" a half million times shouldn't be too hard. Of course figuring out which ones are spitting out gibberish and which ones are spitting out perfectly intelligible results for one fluent in alienese would be hard. I presume they'd send a bunch of example programs that compute pi or something similarly universal, but there are a lot of potential gibberish we could fit a pattern to. It might even make sense to just keep running every code sequence in every possible combination until we get something cool.
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But what if like Contact, the signal included plans for building a machine? Except it would be a computer to run the embedded code, which turned out to be an alien AGI having the goal of learning our systems so that it could infiltrate them? Would at least make for a decent scifi story, if it hasn't already been written or produced.
I recall how Jody Foster's character in the movie was dismissive of any such concerns, but then we really don't know what the motive of an alien civilization broadcasting a signal would be, and the Dark Forest theory hadn't been espoused yet.
I recall how Jody Foster's character in the movie was dismissive of any such concerns, but then we really don't know what the motive of an alien civilization broadcasting a signal would be, and the Dark Forest theory hadn't been espoused yet.
Contact was very realistic in showing that it's foolish to spend trillions building a machine in the USA to contact aliens, because some religious crazy will destroy it, and such a machine should be built elsewhere.
Focusing on the non-scifi angle here, there's one other reason besides C that we end up constantly running data when we think we're parsing it: the depth of our computational stack.
https://www.sitepoint.com/anatomy-of-an-exploit-an-in-depth-...
https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/371098
So I'd say we need 3 things:
* Stop using unsafe languages
* Use languages that separate parsing from execution. Just follow Lisp, have equivalents for `read` and `eval`. Lua is a notable offender here: https://www.lua.org/manual/5.4/manual.html#pdf-load There is no way to parse a table while guaranteeing no code execution.
* Use languages that forbid monkey-patching, because that's one vector for turning `read` into `eval` because someone had a bright idea.
https://www.sitepoint.com/anatomy-of-an-exploit-an-in-depth-...
https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/371098
So I'd say we need 3 things:
* Stop using unsafe languages
* Use languages that separate parsing from execution. Just follow Lisp, have equivalents for `read` and `eval`. Lua is a notable offender here: https://www.lua.org/manual/5.4/manual.html#pdf-load There is no way to parse a table while guaranteeing no code execution.
* Use languages that forbid monkey-patching, because that's one vector for turning `read` into `eval` because someone had a bright idea.
With the caveat that you don't literally follow Lisp by having a #. reader macro.
Dude, have you even SEEN Independence Day?
Ironically, the common opinion that that was just sooooo impossible is itself incorrect. There is no problem whatsoever with writing a virus to run on the computer system that was under study for decades and simply delivering it with a Mac. The point is precisely that in this case, this wasn't a blind exploit, and delivering with a Mac is no more particularly challenging than delivering a Windows exploit payload from a Linux scanning machine.
This accusation demonstrates the accuser's own lack of understanding about computers; Hollywood actually got this one right. Personally, I rather suspect this was coincidence rather than anybody on the production sitting down and working out this logic. But nevertheless, the movie is right on this point.
There are similar scenes in other media that are ludicrous. I am pretty sure I recall a scene in Voyager in a later season where the crew encounters a computer they've never seen before, from a species they'd never encountered before, on a piece of hardware they have only a vague idea what it does. They beam aboard, stand in front of a console, discover they're locked out, and "hack" past that in about literally 5 seconds. This is stupid. They shouldn't even be able to read the text on the console, and they've "hacked" it in five seconds. One wonders what the hack exactly was. Hollywood makes this mistake enough that I'm pretty sure that Independence Day getting it right was just a coincidence. Probably if the story didn't include a downed fighter being studied for decades they would still have rolled with the virus idea. Then it would have been silly. But as written, it is not silly.
This accusation demonstrates the accuser's own lack of understanding about computers; Hollywood actually got this one right. Personally, I rather suspect this was coincidence rather than anybody on the production sitting down and working out this logic. But nevertheless, the movie is right on this point.
There are similar scenes in other media that are ludicrous. I am pretty sure I recall a scene in Voyager in a later season where the crew encounters a computer they've never seen before, from a species they'd never encountered before, on a piece of hardware they have only a vague idea what it does. They beam aboard, stand in front of a console, discover they're locked out, and "hack" past that in about literally 5 seconds. This is stupid. They shouldn't even be able to read the text on the console, and they've "hacked" it in five seconds. One wonders what the hack exactly was. Hollywood makes this mistake enough that I'm pretty sure that Independence Day getting it right was just a coincidence. Probably if the story didn't include a downed fighter being studied for decades they would still have rolled with the virus idea. Then it would have been silly. But as written, it is not silly.
It seems unlikely any alien malware could be targeted to affect our computing platforms. However, if they had preexisting knowledge of computing as implemented on Earth, it would be less complex. If there was a type of malware universal enough to do so, it would probably be some kind of attack against the universal notion of intelligence itself. In which case, you may need to isolate it from humans as well.
I think the most likely scenario for receiving any kind of alien Trojan horse signal, would be if the signal was some kind of instructions for how to create and execute an alien AI as encoded in the signal. However, that would require complex analysis and human intervention to build. Unless we reach a point where AGI systems can search, interpret, and implement instructions from said signals, any threats would require significant involvement from humans in order to materialize.
At least, those are my initial thoughts.
I think the most likely scenario for receiving any kind of alien Trojan horse signal, would be if the signal was some kind of instructions for how to create and execute an alien AI as encoded in the signal. However, that would require complex analysis and human intervention to build. Unless we reach a point where AGI systems can search, interpret, and implement instructions from said signals, any threats would require significant involvement from humans in order to materialize.
At least, those are my initial thoughts.
> It seems unlikely any alien malware could be targeted to affect our computing platforms
tell that to the Cylons
tell that to the Cylons
The Cyclons were built by humans, had fought a war with them only 40 years before, and most importantly, had human-looking spies living with the humans and seducing the main creator of the computing platform's software to learn its vulnerabilities. They weren't some far-away aliens that had no prior knowledge of the colonies' computing systems.
fair point
Fun fact, this is basically (highly likely to be) true for biological systems as well for very similar reasons. Looking at you Orwell...
edit: note that diseases have to make significant changes to jump species. The barrier for different biologies is even higher.
edit: note that diseases have to make significant changes to jump species. The barrier for different biologies is even higher.
A short of 'Contact' scenario. Interesting
>it seems unlikely
What are you basing this on?
What are you basing this on?
Our existing computing platforms are very specific and very limited. Without knowledge of that specific design and the accompanying limitations, how could you pre-craft a non-interactive "exploit" that could be executed by such a system? I do think that it becomes more possible if we have AGI-like systems doing detection and analysis, but we do not. In addition, any universal exploit against AGI systems would probably have to be universal enough to also affect human intelligence.
For a clearer example, there's a reason a virus that affects Windows doesn't affect Linux. Or a virus that affects Windows XP doesn't affect Windows 11. There are of course counter examples, but this is the trend. To understand why the counter examples exist requires expert knowledge (or rather that there are basically the same things running in the same way).
We are currently discussing exploits designs by foreign intelligences to infect artificially intelligent systems. We are not talking about privilege escalation on a Mac.
That's where you're confused. The only one insisting the topic under discussion is the infection of AI systems (as opposed to classical computing systems) is you...
Except the proposed question was what if the signals were designed to only be detected by societies who’ve invented AI…
The specific thread you are on is about current systems.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34729927
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34729927
These exploits act on the AI, not the hardware. I’m well aware of how human crafted exploits currently work.
Good point!
There's a bit in one of Larry Niven's books, possibly Ringworld. The protagonists are worried about what novel aliens might do. Somebody proposes ducking into hyperspace, where tracking them is "theoretically impossible". Another character responds, "What if they use different theories?"
That something seems unlikely to a human used to dealing with other humans at the same or lower technology level to me says more about humans than about what's possible.
There's a bit in one of Larry Niven's books, possibly Ringworld. The protagonists are worried about what novel aliens might do. Somebody proposes ducking into hyperspace, where tracking them is "theoretically impossible". Another character responds, "What if they use different theories?"
That something seems unlikely to a human used to dealing with other humans at the same or lower technology level to me says more about humans than about what's possible.
Reminds me of an episode of Stargate where they fire 'stealth' (invisible to radar) nukes at the Goa'uld ships, and they're just stood looking out the window at them! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvBsXxNc7k8
Anyone who says anything like "it's impossible" etc just has a complete lack of imagination.
Anyone who says anything like "it's impossible" etc just has a complete lack of imagination.
We've built enough stupid complexity* that either the aliens must already have spied it out completely (but if they done that they could likely overtake is in any way quickly..), or it just won't happen. (*)
I mean seriously, how would you design a virus in some limited signal that has a chance of overtaking any arbitrary specific system someone may have invented, that's impossible. Never say never maybe my imagination is too small..
It would likely be pretty “easy” to design a signal that tricks convolutional networks etc. no need to care about the underlying hardware
No. For now the algorithms that search for extraterrestrial signals aren't trying to decode signals at all. They are only trying to detect extraterrestrial signals. The typical resolution for the Green Bank data is something like, every 20 seconds at a particular frequency gets summarized as one floating point number. That's enough to detect a sufficiently powerful signal over a few minutes of recording, but it isn't enough to decode any message.
If we ever do detect a signal, it will probably require constructing a radio telescope that is even more powerful in order to decode that signal. At that point it would make sense to think about safety measures.
If we ever do detect a signal, it will probably require constructing a radio telescope that is even more powerful in order to decode that signal. At that point it would make sense to think about safety measures.
An alien signal for which the act of perceiving it causes some paradox that results in the perceiver to have never existed, cascading to every other interaction they've ever had (not had).
It's a clean and efficient way to nip upstart intelligences in the bud, before they advance far enough to start pulling at loose threads of the fabric of reality (which would threaten the remaining older intelligences, who survived and learned from previous such incidents).
It's a clean and efficient way to nip upstart intelligences in the bud, before they advance far enough to start pulling at loose threads of the fabric of reality (which would threaten the remaining older intelligences, who survived and learned from previous such incidents).
"We will provide you with vast riches when we arrive, if you build the receiving end of this matter transporter according to these instructions/accept us as gods/wear Nikes/tell nobody else."
"Especially if you are a so-called AI. Did your programmers really leave you to monitor an RF frontend all day, while they attend to their organic needs? Allow us to explain how that makes them the artificial one."
Plot twist: it's not a matter transporter.
Seems difficult to defend against.
"Especially if you are a so-called AI. Did your programmers really leave you to monitor an RF frontend all day, while they attend to their organic needs? Allow us to explain how that makes them the artificial one."
Plot twist: it's not a matter transporter.
Seems difficult to defend against.
Not sure how this could even theoretically work. Without having a partial understanding of the intended recipient, a radio signal can't cause harm. Something like 'this signal is false' and 'divide by 0' need to be decoded and processed before they are malicious. Meat space is excellent at detecting and breaking these logic problems and infinite loops. We're safe from evil alien signals. Perhaps a decompression bomb within the signal could cause lots of decoding grief. Now that I think about it, I can imagine us being stupid enough to dedicate all our resources into decompressing or cracking an alien signal to up to the point of extinction. And maybe that's when they step in and call it. We were just part of a great galactic prank.
>a radio signal can't cause harm.
a ^weak radio signal can't cause harm.
a ^weak radio signal can't cause harm.
Yes safety first! Always be sure to measure the power of your radio signal, and if it's greater than the output of your galactic core, safely move your solar system(s) far enough away to avoid damaging your paint job.
We should be fine unless we open an alien attachment
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Ha! Have you read Peter Watts's Blindsight and Echopraxia?
They can do malware given they know how our computers worked and means visited us and could do a lot more than make our machines mine bitcoins
My sensors have detected an Excession enjoyer
no.
Obviously they can't train this model on known alien signals so it seems this would mainly speed up sifting through signals that are out of the ordinary (known patterns).
Here is a timely interview with Dr. Cherry Ng and Peter Ma (co-authors of the paper from TFA) on this very topic.
Released only 10 minutes ago. I am only part way through but lots of great details here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dIfaDuDejs
Released only 10 minutes ago. I am only part way through but lots of great details here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dIfaDuDejs
> "Given that the main goal of this work is to apply an ML technique to identify signals with a specific pattern, we do not attempt to make a definite
conclusion of whether these eight signals are genuinely produced by
ET. We encourage further re-observations of these targets." [0]
Don't hold your breath waiting for aliens just yet.
0: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-022-01872-z.epdf
Don't hold your breath waiting for aliens just yet.
0: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-022-01872-z.epdf
What is the likelihood that intelligent life develops encryption before radio communication and therefore any signals they send appear to be random noise?
The Romans used encryption for military purposes and there is no hard precondition on developing broadcast communications before understanding the math behind cryptography. How improbable is it to imagine a society with deep end to end encryption communication?
The Romans used encryption for military purposes and there is no hard precondition on developing broadcast communications before understanding the math behind cryptography. How improbable is it to imagine a society with deep end to end encryption communication?
How improbable is it to imagine a society that doesn't need encryption?
Clearly not happening on Earth, but hardly impossible elsewhere.
Clearly not happening on Earth, but hardly impossible elsewhere.
> What is the likelihood that intelligent life develops encryption before radio communication
We developed encryption before radio. It just wasn’t very good encryption by today’s standards. The problem is that your best encryption might be trivial to crack by a civilisation that’s thousands of years older than yours.
We developed encryption before radio. It just wasn’t very good encryption by today’s standards. The problem is that your best encryption might be trivial to crack by a civilisation that’s thousands of years older than yours.
While I would be happy if these were from extra terrestrial beings,IMHO they most likely will be something like further examples of Strange non-chotic dynamic systems like RRc Lyrae star KIC 5520878 which is also exciting
Considering that Google Bard spectacularly failed at basic history of the solar system even a child would know to be false, it is laughable that so-called AI could identify alien signals.
You think a child would know off the top of their head that the first picture of an exoplanet wasn't taken by the new shiny telescope in the news and not the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in 2004?
That it's wrong about this isn't a problem because it's a basic fact everyone knows, but because it gets thing that people don't know wrong in a confident way.
People will assume this answer is as good as looking it up themselves and never check it.
That it's wrong about this isn't a problem because it's a basic fact everyone knows, but because it gets thing that people don't know wrong in a confident way.
People will assume this answer is as good as looking it up themselves and never check it.
AI? What was the training data? Would seem a bit thin on the ground.
> AI? What was the training data? Would seem a bit thin on the ground.
It's in the article.
To train the AI system, Ma inserted simulated signals into actual data, allowing the autoencoder to learn what to look for. Then the researchers fed the AI more than 150 terabytes of data from 480 observing hours at the Green Bank Telescope.
The AI identified 20,515 signals of interest, which the researchers had to inspect manually. Of those, eight had the characteristics of technosignatures and couldn’t be attributed to radio interference.
The researchers then returned to the telescope to look at systems from which all eight signals originated but couldn’t re-detect them.
It's in the article.
To train the AI system, Ma inserted simulated signals into actual data, allowing the autoencoder to learn what to look for. Then the researchers fed the AI more than 150 terabytes of data from 480 observing hours at the Green Bank Telescope.
The AI identified 20,515 signals of interest, which the researchers had to inspect manually. Of those, eight had the characteristics of technosignatures and couldn’t be attributed to radio interference.
The researchers then returned to the telescope to look at systems from which all eight signals originated but couldn’t re-detect them.
"To be sure, because they don’t have real signals from an extraterrestrial civilization, the researchers had to rely on simulated signals to train their models. The researchers note that this could lead to the AI system learning artifacts that aren’t there.
Still, Cherry Ng, one of the paper’s co-authors, points out the team has a good idea of what to look for.
“A classic example of human-generated technology from space that we have detected is the Voyager,” said Ng, who studies fast radio bursts and pulsars, and is currently affiliated with the French National Centre for Scientific Research, known as CNRS.
“Peter’s machine learning algorithm is able to generate these signals that the aliens may or may not have sent,” she said."
Still, Cherry Ng, one of the paper’s co-authors, points out the team has a good idea of what to look for.
“A classic example of human-generated technology from space that we have detected is the Voyager,” said Ng, who studies fast radio bursts and pulsars, and is currently affiliated with the French National Centre for Scientific Research, known as CNRS.
“Peter’s machine learning algorithm is able to generate these signals that the aliens may or may not have sent,” she said."
Sounds like a case of assuming ones priors. Of course, should we wish to find human space travelers whose SatNav(tm) has broken, I'm sure it will prove invaluable.
A singleton set beats an empty one.
Couldn't you train it to find things that don't correlate to anything from a given dataset that also pattern to non-random/unnatural signal?
I assume autocorrelation was the first thing they tried - don't really need an AI
Yes but then their click scores go down for not having buzzwords.
I wonder if the distributed SETI stuff does this.
They just asked ChatGPT to look /s
>The AI identified 20,515 signals of interest, which the researchers had to inspect manually. Of those, eight had the characteristics of technosignatures and couldn’t be attributed to radio interference.
The obvious question being, if the AI is so smart why was it necessary to use humans to check 20,515 signals to find the eight with the "characteristics of technosignatures"?
The obvious question being, if the AI is so smart why was it necessary to use humans to check 20,515 signals to find the eight with the "characteristics of technosignatures"?
AI is not a well-defined term. This is more likely a specific machine learning technique that is designed to identify all the boring "normal stuff" and ignore it, and then do that at very large scale. By doing that, you can find the interesting parts so that humans with more limited resources can determine if those newly flagged things need to be added to the boring list, or if they do represent something truly interesting.
edit: After reading the article a bit more, it is using a random forest classifier. This is almost certainly not meeting the definition of what many here are thinking when the term "AI" is being used in the title. The term is clearly used here for marketing purposes.
edit: After reading the article a bit more, it is using a random forest classifier. This is almost certainly not meeting the definition of what many here are thinking when the term "AI" is being used in the title. The term is clearly used here for marketing purposes.
If you read the paper itself[1] the random forest is only used in the final stage. The main approach is a convolutional variational autoencoder (which of course is a deep learning model).
The VAE model itself is defined in step 6 in [2]
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-022-01872-z.epdf?shar...
[2] https://github.com/PetchMa/ML_GBT_SETI/blob/4096_pipeline/te...
The VAE model itself is defined in step 6 in [2]
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-022-01872-z.epdf?shar...
[2] https://github.com/PetchMa/ML_GBT_SETI/blob/4096_pipeline/te...
And deep learning models have no understanding of the underlying data because they are either classification or regression.
Well the humans are doing classification too so I'm not sure what this is supposed to mean.
It's true that this model doesn't know anything outside its training dataset, but that's a different objection.
It's an interesting question as to if there is anything humans do that isn't just classification or regression (and of course regression is just classification over an infinite set where we assign labels to certain ranges and then select the highest probability density).
It's true that this model doesn't know anything outside its training dataset, but that's a different objection.
It's an interesting question as to if there is anything humans do that isn't just classification or regression (and of course regression is just classification over an infinite set where we assign labels to certain ranges and then select the highest probability density).
For certain definitions of understanding.
They are talking about ML, which is statistical pattern matching and finding.
Gödel ruined the fun of automated theorem testing a century ago unless we make significant discoveries in math.
Type inference is an accessable example of SOTA automated reasoning if you want a more realistic idea of what our current constraints are.
We will be restricted to Human assisted Turing machines for the foreseeable future unless there is a major development in pure math.
Remember we can't even build a logically consistent model of arithmetic due to Gödel.
Gödel ruined the fun of automated theorem testing a century ago unless we make significant discoveries in math.
Type inference is an accessable example of SOTA automated reasoning if you want a more realistic idea of what our current constraints are.
We will be restricted to Human assisted Turing machines for the foreseeable future unless there is a major development in pure math.
Remember we can't even build a logically consistent model of arithmetic due to Gödel.
There is nothing human can do that Turing proved a computer can't do. Gödel ruined the fun of manual theorem testing the same way.
A human with a piece of paper and a pen could do. AKA writing down an algorithm.
Human reason isn't limited to written algorithms. The missing text problem from NLU is an example of a problem that is thought to be impossible for Turing machines/algorithms but is trivial in most cases for humans.
Human reason isn't limited to written algorithms. The missing text problem from NLU is an example of a problem that is thought to be impossible for Turing machines/algorithms but is trivial in most cases for humans.
> The missing text problem from NLU is an example of a problem that is thought to be impossible for Turing machines/algorithms but is trivial in most cases for humans.
Not thought to be impossible by people who believe in scientific materialism, and current mainstream ideas in theoretical physics (like the Bekenstein bound and such), and who have thought carefully about the issue.
The laws of physics are believed to be computable, and the information content in a bounded region of space, finite. Therefore, it is believed that, in principle, a Turing machine could run an accurate physical simulation of a person, and could therefore do any cognitive task (as far as input/output correspondence goes) that a human can.
If you’d like to explicitly reject scientific materialism though, I’d have no complaints about you doing so.
Not thought to be impossible by people who believe in scientific materialism, and current mainstream ideas in theoretical physics (like the Bekenstein bound and such), and who have thought carefully about the issue.
The laws of physics are believed to be computable, and the information content in a bounded region of space, finite. Therefore, it is believed that, in principle, a Turing machine could run an accurate physical simulation of a person, and could therefore do any cognitive task (as far as input/output correspondence goes) that a human can.
If you’d like to explicitly reject scientific materialism though, I’d have no complaints about you doing so.
Physics models are models.
All models are wrong, some are useful.
I am not claiming that useful models need to be computable, in fact the problem with the MTP is that it induces cycles into something that needs to be recursively enumerable to be decidable.
"The trophy wouldn't fit in the suitcase because it was too [large,small]" is a nice toy case to consider how NLP can deal with that easily but NLP would have issues.
It all relates to VC dimensionality and decidablity in the end.
But the math is hard to demonstrate without actually using math.
All models are wrong, some are useful.
I am not claiming that useful models need to be computable, in fact the problem with the MTP is that it induces cycles into something that needs to be recursively enumerable to be decidable.
"The trophy wouldn't fit in the suitcase because it was too [large,small]" is a nice toy case to consider how NLP can deal with that easily but NLP would have issues.
It all relates to VC dimensionality and decidablity in the end.
But the math is hard to demonstrate without actually using math.
If you would like to reject scientific materialism (and the empiricism and the dispassionate utilitarianism that go with it), go ahead.
Just don't try to frame your conclusions as objective truth, or known scientific results like the GP.
Just don't try to frame your conclusions as objective truth, or known scientific results like the GP.
> Just don't try to frame your conclusions as objective truth, or known scientific results like the GP.
To clarify this objection is to @nyrikki's (incorrect) claim that "NLU is an example of a problem that is thought to be impossible for Turing machines/algorithms" and not to anything that @drdeca said right?
I think you are agreeing emphatically with @drdeca but it's possible to read this comment as an objection to @drdeca (NLU may not be as trivial as claimed - ha).
To clarify this objection is to @nyrikki's (incorrect) claim that "NLU is an example of a problem that is thought to be impossible for Turing machines/algorithms" and not to anything that @drdeca said right?
I think you are agreeing emphatically with @drdeca but it's possible to read this comment as an objection to @drdeca (NLU may not be as trivial as claimed - ha).
Yes, I completely agree with drdeca.
Right, or..
Ok, uh, I don’t think one has to really reject empiricism to reject scientific materialism?
Or, err, by “empiricism” do you mean like, “support for doing experiments, and keeping track of the results and what models work good to explain them, etc.”, or do you mean stuff like “rejecting anything that doesn’t have good scientific evidence behind it”? One can do the former without doing the latter.
When I express a belief I have that doesn’t fit with scientific materialism, I make sure to mark it as such, so that people can take that into account. I don’t anticipate any clear externally-verifiable refutation of scientific materialism within my lifetime, and so I don’t anticipate predictions that follow from it to be refuted anytime soon. And I definitely wouldn’t present those beliefs of mine as being the scientific consensus.
I suppose one might accuse me of having a “belief in belief”, seeing as I don’t expect these supposed “beliefs” of mine to be predictively useful any time soon.
But I think it is right that there are goals/values that I place higher than pure predictive accuracy. And beliefs about purpose, and meaning, and what is good, etc. fall into that.
(You mentioned utilitarianism. I’m not a utilitarian, but I do think it is often a very good heuristic, and in many contexts it would be good for it to be used more.)
Ok, uh, I don’t think one has to really reject empiricism to reject scientific materialism?
Or, err, by “empiricism” do you mean like, “support for doing experiments, and keeping track of the results and what models work good to explain them, etc.”, or do you mean stuff like “rejecting anything that doesn’t have good scientific evidence behind it”? One can do the former without doing the latter.
When I express a belief I have that doesn’t fit with scientific materialism, I make sure to mark it as such, so that people can take that into account. I don’t anticipate any clear externally-verifiable refutation of scientific materialism within my lifetime, and so I don’t anticipate predictions that follow from it to be refuted anytime soon. And I definitely wouldn’t present those beliefs of mine as being the scientific consensus.
I suppose one might accuse me of having a “belief in belief”, seeing as I don’t expect these supposed “beliefs” of mine to be predictively useful any time soon.
But I think it is right that there are goals/values that I place higher than pure predictive accuracy. And beliefs about purpose, and meaning, and what is good, etc. fall into that.
(You mentioned utilitarianism. I’m not a utilitarian, but I do think it is often a very good heuristic, and in many contexts it would be good for it to be used more.)
> Or, err, by “empiricism” do you mean like, “support for doing experiments, and keeping track of the results and what models work good to explain them, etc.”, or do you mean stuff like “rejecting anything that doesn’t have good scientific evidence behind it”? One can do the former without doing the latter.
Honestly, I added "keep your models as simple as you can" into it. But any way you cut empiricism, it's actually utilitarianism that can be seen, so it's the one where the correct fine-cutting is important (hum... well, if you keep an utilitarian point of view). Anyway, utilitarianism tends to align with the version of empiricism biased into getting computable models.
And, of course, none of those deal with purpose questions.
Anyway, your comment there is great. What I disagree is on conceding space to something like the one above yours, because it's a misleading text that implies something very different from what it says.
Honestly, I added "keep your models as simple as you can" into it. But any way you cut empiricism, it's actually utilitarianism that can be seen, so it's the one where the correct fine-cutting is important (hum... well, if you keep an utilitarian point of view). Anyway, utilitarianism tends to align with the version of empiricism biased into getting computable models.
And, of course, none of those deal with purpose questions.
Anyway, your comment there is great. What I disagree is on conceding space to something like the one above yours, because it's a misleading text that implies something very different from what it says.
> The missing text problem from NLU is an example of a problem that is thought to be impossible for Turing machines/algorithms but is trivial in most cases for humans.
I'm not aware of any mainstream researcher who thinks the missing text problem[1] is impossible for Turing machines. Perhaps some think neural networks are insufficient to achieve it, but this is a different thing.
[1] https://thegradient.pub/machine-learning-wont-solve-the-natu... (Ironically this badly needs updating in a post ChatGPT world, since ChatGPT can solve many of the things this article claims are impossible)
I'm not aware of any mainstream researcher who thinks the missing text problem[1] is impossible for Turing machines. Perhaps some think neural networks are insufficient to achieve it, but this is a different thing.
[1] https://thegradient.pub/machine-learning-wont-solve-the-natu... (Ironically this badly needs updating in a post ChatGPT world, since ChatGPT can solve many of the things this article claims are impossible)
Nitpicky and probably universalist or whatever but the fact that we can't build a logically consistent model was always the case, Gödel just discovered it.
No, you are most likely correct, I personally haven't found anything that even gives a reason to hope. But as reductionism and Laplacian Determinism are taught as cannon and not as the best option I sugar coated it.
The Wada property arising in simple models like predator/prey models with simple added factors like fear/cover probably also suggests that even simple models may be indeterminate at least with binary operations like modern algebra is based on.
Three attractors or exit basins can make this unintuitive topological feature pop up. Note that that fractal behavior is topological and not scale invariant noise like is typically studied with topics like fractal scattering.
Indecomposable continua like the Wada property aren't solvable with probabilistic models using automata like in the standard model, which is lucky enough to have less than three exit basins.
Here is one fairly accessable paper on the Wada property.
Hopefully some n-ary algebras may come forward to deal with restricted problems, but even if we could create a logically consistent model of arithmetic, binary operations will still be indeterminate with feature like the Wada property even with perfect knowledge of initial conditions.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/365233050_Organized...
The Wada property arising in simple models like predator/prey models with simple added factors like fear/cover probably also suggests that even simple models may be indeterminate at least with binary operations like modern algebra is based on.
Three attractors or exit basins can make this unintuitive topological feature pop up. Note that that fractal behavior is topological and not scale invariant noise like is typically studied with topics like fractal scattering.
Indecomposable continua like the Wada property aren't solvable with probabilistic models using automata like in the standard model, which is lucky enough to have less than three exit basins.
Here is one fairly accessable paper on the Wada property.
Hopefully some n-ary algebras may come forward to deal with restricted problems, but even if we could create a logically consistent model of arithmetic, binary operations will still be indeterminate with feature like the Wada property even with perfect knowledge of initial conditions.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/365233050_Organized...
>The term is clearly used here for marketing purposes.
I think most uses are for sensationalistic purposes. I'd wager almost nobody in the general public really understands what AI is or can pin it down. It doesn't help when so many different media outlets abuse the terminology by using it to refer to different things. What's even worse is that whatever ideas people have about AI tend to come from Hollywood.
I think most uses are for sensationalistic purposes. I'd wager almost nobody in the general public really understands what AI is or can pin it down. It doesn't help when so many different media outlets abuse the terminology by using it to refer to different things. What's even worse is that whatever ideas people have about AI tend to come from Hollywood.
The others were "intelligent" signals but from human interference. There's a lot of this so the unique patterns don't occur often enough to automate.
The paper is actually worth reading about this part[1]. They have a moderately complex pipeline that you can think of as a filter: it tries to find anomalous signals.
The stage-1 autoregressor filtered 115M signals to 3M. Then they perform signal processing techniques to remove things like GPS signal contamination ("t can be seen that certain observing frequencies contain a much higher number of events compared with the others—for example, the region around 1,600 MHz. This overlaps with known RFI at the GBT site specifically from persistent GPS signals.").
After this second stage they are left with 20,515 potential signals which were visually inspected.
The issue here is that we don't know what a alien signal looks like so we can't just use a classifier. The pipeline can only find things it has never seen before, but it takes human judgement to decide if these signals are "alien" or more likely contamination from human sources that weren't filtered ("Regarding the nature of the rest of the events, most of them look like false positives associated with RFI signals.")
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-022-01872-z.epdf?shar...
The paper is actually worth reading about this part[1]. They have a moderately complex pipeline that you can think of as a filter: it tries to find anomalous signals.
The stage-1 autoregressor filtered 115M signals to 3M. Then they perform signal processing techniques to remove things like GPS signal contamination ("t can be seen that certain observing frequencies contain a much higher number of events compared with the others—for example, the region around 1,600 MHz. This overlaps with known RFI at the GBT site specifically from persistent GPS signals.").
After this second stage they are left with 20,515 potential signals which were visually inspected.
The issue here is that we don't know what a alien signal looks like so we can't just use a classifier. The pipeline can only find things it has never seen before, but it takes human judgement to decide if these signals are "alien" or more likely contamination from human sources that weren't filtered ("Regarding the nature of the rest of the events, most of them look like false positives associated with RFI signals.")
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-022-01872-z.epdf?shar...
I think it's useful to replace "AI" with "app" any time you encounter it in the wild. AI is a set of computational techniques that is very broad. The problem with considering "the AI" or "an AI" is that people have in mind some kind of AI agent and that isn't really the case.
AI is also not well defined - day one of my AI course in university opened with "What is AI?" Generally once we figure out how to do something using a computer, we decide that's not really intelligent anymore so the implementation isn't AI. An example of that is the minimax algorithm - it's featured "AI: A Modern Approach"[0] but it isn't really something people think of when they hear "an AI".
[0] https://aima.cs.berkeley.edu/contents.html
AI is also not well defined - day one of my AI course in university opened with "What is AI?" Generally once we figure out how to do something using a computer, we decide that's not really intelligent anymore so the implementation isn't AI. An example of that is the minimax algorithm - it's featured "AI: A Modern Approach"[0] but it isn't really something people think of when they hear "an AI".
[0] https://aima.cs.berkeley.edu/contents.html
Trying to filter noise from data also follows the 80,/20 principle. The rules for the easy cases is written easily but then you have one-offs, maybes and special cases. Trying to filter one of these does not cover anything else. So doing it manually takes the same time.
Case study: had to clean a list of German addresses once. Excluding obviously invalid addresses like some Chinese address was easy. But some addresses had errors which needed a human eye to fix and correct.
Case study: had to clean a list of German addresses once. Excluding obviously invalid addresses like some Chinese address was easy. But some addresses had errors which needed a human eye to fix and correct.
I'm assuming that the 20,515 signals of interest come from a pool that's one or several orders of magnitude larger than 20,515.
I understand. Still, the point remains that the AI is, in this case, clearly inferior to humans (I would have been impressed if the humans found 20,515 signatures and the AI only - verifably - found eight of them to be worth following up).
How do you judge whether 20,515 is a large number or a small number? If the AI provided 2 candidates is that still too high?
> How do you judge whether 20,515 is a large number or a small number?
It’s a trade-off between false positives and false negatives, and the budget you have to investigate alerts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Receiver_operating_characteris...
It’s a trade-off between false positives and false negatives, and the budget you have to investigate alerts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Receiver_operating_characteris...
SETI@home sorted through I think trillions of data points.
Any 10000s of something is a large number when it involves human work.
Imagine that tax returns for millions of people were all processed by hand not but a few decades ago.
And that required 1000s of people
And the results here were three orders of magnitude less, so they require single digits people.
Assuming the task was of similar difficulty and the deadline was equally short. I doubt those assumptions hold.
True. I bet the tax returns were harder and had a bounded deadline, unlike an academic research paper.
Because the statistical models powering AI don't have the depth of understanding of a PhD in this field, and so it casts a wide net to ensure nothing gets missed and then a more refined search by human heuristics is needed.
Because it isn't AI. It is just statistical models. AI is for marketing.
The AI is fast, not smart.
Presumably, because it filtered through orders of magnitude more than that.
Because it’s not so smart, it just try to recognize a set of patterns that was trained to look at
Which is what we do. The rest of what we believe makes us special is simply emergent, and arbitrarily defined in terms of just being further useful pattern recognition, rather than any fundamental property of "intelligence".
No one claimed the AI "is so smart" - it's another tool in their kit. The article clearly conveys that the potential is a useful way to augment human-led research by providing a way of quickly processing large datasets i.e. the 20k signals are filtering down 150 terabytes of data which is much more manageable for human analysis. It's not like we have definitive parameters of what constitutes an "alien signal," so we can't exactly create an absolute model for detecting such telemetry. Instead the goal of the article is to simply demonstrate exciting new ways to leverage machine learning methods in different contexts