Age of AI) Ep.8(Final) How AI is searching for Aliens

 

How A.I. is Searching for Aliens: The Quest to Answer Humanity’s Biggest Question

For centuries, the star-studded night sky has sparked our curiosity: are we alone in the universe? This age-old question, once confined to the realms of philosophy and science fiction, is now at the forefront of modern scientific inquiry, thanks to advancements in Artificial Intelligence (A.I.). Our solar system, a tiny speck in the vast expanse of the galaxy, suggests the high probability of life existing elsewhere. With A.I., we’re not just looking closer to home; we’re expanding our search to the far reaches of the universe. The progress in A.I. technology brings new tools to explore these existential mysteries, transforming the way we approach the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

The journey begins with understanding the origins of life itself. Researchers are delving into the fundamental question: how does life begin? A.I. is instrumental in this quest, analyzing vast amounts of data from space to unravel the conditions under which life can thrive. As decades of scientific discovery increasingly suggest the likelihood of life beyond Earth, A.I. stands as a pivotal ally in our quest. It’s more than just a search for extraterrestrial beings; it’s a pursuit to understand our place in the cosmos. In this era, termed the ‘Age of A.I.’, we’re not only looking to answer whether we’re alone in the universe but also exploring the possibility of creating intelligent, synthetic life forms, akin to a second version of ourselves. The possibilities are as boundless as the stars above us.

SETI

• There’s vast amounts of data coming from space, and A.I. can allow us to understand that data better than we have been able to in the past. It’s this new capacity we have to see patterns in data which was beyond our mammalian brains.
• We are trying to find evidence of somebody else’s technology out there. We can’t define intelligence, but we’re using technology as a proxy, so if we find some technology, something that’s engineered, something that nature didn’t do, then we’re going to infer that at least at some point in time, there were some intelligent technologists who were responsible.
• The sole mission of the Allen Telescope Array, or A.T.A., is to search for extraterrestrial life. Past telescopes were basically toy binoculars compared to the A.T.A., which was built in 2007 with support from Microsoft’s Paul Allen. Part of what makes it light-years ahead is its wider field of view, and ability to capture a greater range of frequencies. It’s also an array, which basically means it’s a group of many small dishes working together to cover more ground, or sky.
• The radio signals from each one of these dishes are brought into our control room, digitized, made into binary ones and zeroes, and combined together to create the effect of having one large dish, so we can actually map out the sky much like you would with a regular optical telescope.
• You know, often when people think of the search for extraterrestrial life, they’re thinking of someone with headphones listening in on something that is sent to us, something that’s obvious. It’s really not like that. It’s a lot more subtle, and that’s why we’re going to be collecting enormous amounts of data.
• All of the different parameters we might have to explore set that volume, that exploration volume, set it equal to the volume of all the oceans on the Earth. So how much have we done, in 50 years? Well, we’ve searched one glass of water from the Earth’s oceans. The technologies that we’ve had to use until now were not big enough, not adequate to the job. That’s why we need computer systems and artificial intelligence systems to really turn that search on its head.
• When we think about traditional software, we think about human beings writing lines of code. What’s extraordinary about A.I. is that we’re teaching machines how to learn. This is why it’s a quantum leap, because for the first time, instead of human beings writing the software, the computer’s actually building an understanding itself.

Time Traveling

• Because of how far away these planets are, and how long it takes radio waves to travel through space,
• the guys are listening to a conversation from about 40 years ago. Here’s some perspective. It takes about eight minutes for radio waves to get from here to the sun. So, these planets? Yeah, a little farther away.
• It’s not all about us. No one’s sending us a signal, no one’s trying to get our attention. The whole point about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is you don’t even — We don’t know what we’re looking for. Instead of looking for something specific, you have to look for the exceptions from what is normal. That is where I think A.I. is gonna just completely change the game for SETI.
• To find order in the randomness, the A.I. picks a small area and studies its radio frequency data to learn what normal sounds like. Then, it uses this info to filter out background signals from all the data that’s been collected. What’s left is any signal, pattern, or repetition that is unnatural.
• Now, it’s very subtle, and this is why we’ll need machine-learning to extract whether what we’re seeing is just something we’re seeing, or it’s real, a real phenomenon.
• Some people think that the emergence of artificial intelligence is the biggest event on the planet since life, because it’s going to be a change that is as big as the emergence of life. It will lead to different kinds of life that are very different from the entire set of, you know, DNA, carbon-based life that we’ve had so far.

Inner Life

• While some are ramping up the search in outer space, others are using A.I. to further explore inner life.
• In 20 to 30 years’ time, you might see a street like this, with humans walking up and down it, but there might also be a new thing, which is human-like robots might be walking up and down, too, with us. Humans and robots are really gonna be doing the same kinds of things, and some of the things they’ll be doing will be maybe superior to humans.
• Our mission is to create machines that are indistinguishable from humans physically, cognitively, and emotionally. Doing so involves solving problems of engineering, computer science, neuroscience, biology, even art and design. But for her, the problem of artificially replicating a person boils down to a deeper question… What does it mean to be human?
• Understanding what it is to be human is a question that we’ve been asking ourselves for many thousands of years, so I’d like to turn science and technology to that question to try and figure out who we are.
• We love stories and films about clones and replicants and humanoid robots. Why are we so obsessed with the idea of recreating ourselves? Is it biological? Existential?
• To try and understand something fully, you have to reverse-engineer it, you have to put it back together. [Downey] The human that Suzanne knows best is… Suzanne, so one of her projects is to build a synthetic replica of herself.
• There’s this thing called the Turing test, which is trying to have an A.I. that you can’t tell is not a human. So I wanna try and create a physical Turing test, where you can’t tell whether or not the system you’re actually physically interacting with is a person, or whether it’s a robot.
• So here we have 132 cameras which are all pointed at me, and they all take a photograph simultaneously. This data is used to create a full three-dimensional body scan of me that we can then use to create a robot version of me.
• Suzanne believes that we experience life through the senses, so she’s putting as much work into making the body lifelike as she is the mind.
• We broke down this very ambitious project into several different categories. The first category is physical. Can you build a robotic system that looks like a person?
• We build a machine that perceives like a human by trying to copy the human sensorium very accurately. The most complicated part of the perception system is actually the sense of touch.
• We’ve actually embedded capacitive touch sensors in the synth’s hand, essentially pressure sensors allowing it to feel, uh, its environment, and interact and manipulate objects.
• The reason the hand and the arm is able to move so fluidly is because of pneumatic actuators. They work using compressed air. You actuate one of these devices, and it kind of contracts and pulls on a tendon, so the actuation mechanism is very similar to a human muscle. It’s just not yet quite as efficient.
• The eyes are super important to get right. Similar to our own vision system, they can see similar color spectrum, and they can also, because there’s two cameras, they can have depth perception too.
• That information is fed through a series of different A.I. algorithms. One algorithm is a facial detection system. If you’re smiling, the corners of your mouth come up, your eyes open a little bit, and the A.I. system can actually detect how those landmarks have moved relative to one another.
• I think the moment in time we’re at right now is very exciting because there’s this field that’s concerned about building human-like generalized intelligence, and sometimes even kind of surpassing human intelligence.

A-I-A-I-O

• There’s people out there who believe that this is on our immediate horizon. I don’t. I think we’re a long ways away from machines that are truly conscious and think on their own.
• We have actually configured a lot of A.I. algorithms on the back end that give the robot the capabilities of recognizing people, detecting emotion, recognizing gestures and poses that people are making. It then responds in various ways with its environment.
• The body, in a way, is the easy part. Creating the mind is a lot harder.
• Creating the mind is more than hard. It’s basically impossible, at least for now, and maybe forever, because a mind is not just knowledge, or skill, or even language, all of which a machine can learn. The part that makes us really human is consciousness; an awareness, a sense of being, of who we are and how we fit in time and space around us. A human mind has that… and memory.
• If you think about how people work, it’s very unusual for you to meet a person that doesn’t have a backstory. I can use all the data that I have about myself to try and craft something that has my memories, it has my same mannerisms, and it thinks and feels the way I do.
• I would like them to become their own beings, and to me, creating the copy is a way of pushing the A.I. further towards making it a realistic human by having it be a copy of a specific human.
• The basic idea is you send in a large amount of text data, and the system learns correlations between words, and the idea is that the synth could use one of these models to kind of blend together an idea of a memory that may have happened or may not have happened, so it’s a little bit of an artistic way of recreating memories.
• So by giving them these backstories now, we believe that we will be able to learn in the future how they can create their own memories from their experiences.
• We talk about the computer revolution like it’s done. It’s barely begun. We don’t understand where the impact of these technologies will be over the next five, ten, 20, 30, 50, 100 years. If you think it’s exciting and confusing now, fasten your seatbelts, because it hasn’t begun.
• Of course there’s that unknown, like are we gonna run into a problem with trying to recreate a mind that no one’s thought of yet?

Ethical Challenges

• It’s not just the science. There’s also the ethics. What kind of rights will the robots have? Can we imbue it with good values, make sure it’s unbiased? What if breaks the law or commits a crime? Are we responsible for our synths?
• There are big ethical challenges in the field of A.I. I believe that as a community of A.I. innovators and thought leaders, we have to really be at the forefront of enforcing and designing these best practices and guidelines around how we build and deploy ethical A.I. I like to say that artificial intelligence should not be about the artificial, it should be about the humans.
• I think it’s perfectly reasonable to have a set of rules that govern ethical behavior when you are dealing with technologies that can have direct impact into people’s lives and their families and the future.
• There are these moments you can have where you really feel something that’s unusual. It’s surprising. I was adjusting the synth’s hair, and then she suddenly, like, smiled, and opened her mouth a little bit, like, you know, like I’d just tickled her or something. It was just, like, synchronous with what I was doing.
• I think A.I. is part of evolution. The same evolution that led from bacteria to animals, and has led people to create technology, has led them to create A.I. In some ways, we’re still in the very early infancy of this new age.

Alien Pulses

• Will we ever create intelligent life here on Earth… or maybe we’ll find it out there first?
• People often talk about finding a needle in a haystack as being a difficult task, but the SETI task is far harder. If I got out of bed every morning thinking, “This is the day we’re gonna find the signal,” I have pretty good odds I’m gonna go to bed that night disappointed.
• I don’t get up in the morning thinking that. What I do get up in the morning thinking is that today, I’m going to figure out how to do this search better, do new things, do things you could not do in the past. Early on, the technology just wasn’t there and now we’re doing something that we’ve never been able to do.
• We didn’t write any code. We didn’t tell it to… to look for spikes of power or anything else. We just said, “You know what, you figure out what’s normal, and you let us know when something catches your attention,” which is exactly what it’s doing there.
• I can see the tools that are being built give us a new way of looking for things that we hadn’t thought of, and things that we don’t have to define up front, anomalies that the machines will find simply because they’ve looked at so much data.
• I do think we’re going to find ET. I do think we are gonna find signs of civilization beyond Earth, and I do think that it’s going to be A.I. that finds it.

What’s Next

• Is there intelligent life out there? Can we create human-like machines?
• The odds are overwhelming that we will eventually be able to build an artificial brain that is at the level of the human brain. The big question is how long will it take?
• If we wanna go to Mars, if we wanna populate other planets, these types of things require these advanced technologies.
• These types of technologies can help us do our tasks better. I believe if we do this right, these A.I. systems can truly, truly compliment what we do as humans.
• We use the A.I. tools to predict what the future not only is, but what it should be.
• I believe that artificial intelligence is really going to be the most important tool in our toolbox for solving the big problems that we face.
• The fact that we can look across the world and find where famine might happen four months from now, it’s mind-blowing.
• And yet, despite all that, a vestige of unknown endures. Who are we? What are we becoming?
• Every major technological change leads to a new kind of society, with new moral principles, and the same thing will happen with A.I. Technology’s changing us, for sure. The whole idea of what it means to be human is getting rewired. A.I. might be humanity’s most valuable tool. …but it’s also just that. A tool.
• What we choose to do with it… that’s up to you and I.
• If you could project yourself into the next millennium, a thousand years from now, would we look back on this generation and say, “Well, they were the last generation of Homo sapiens that actually ran the planet”?
• There’s a lot of paranoia. The media’s done a really good job of making people frightened, but A.I. is just a portrait of reality, a very close portrait, but it isn’t reality. It’s just a bucket of probabilities.
• Where I think human beings will always have the edge are understanding other humans. It’s going to take a long time before we have an A.I. that can understand all of the nuances and various layers of the human experience at a societal level.

The insights and information presented in these articles are based on the YouTube Originals Series “The Age of AI.” All script and content rights belong to the creators and producers of the series. This series served as a primary reference in the development of these articles.