Cosmos on Nautilus: Extraterrestrials May Be Robots Without Consciousness
http://cosmos.nautil.us/feature/72/it-may-not-feel-like-anything-to-be-an-alien
Humans may have one thing that advanced aliens don’t: consciousness.
mans are probably not the greatest intelligences in the universe. Earth is a relatively young planet and the oldest civilizations
could be billions of years older than us. But even on Earth, Homo sapiens may not be the most intelligent species for that much longer.
The world Go, chess, and Jeopardy champions are now all AIs. AI is projected to outmode many human professions within the next few decades.
And given the rapid pace of its development, AI may soon advance to artificial general intelligence—intelligence that, like human intelligence,
can combine insights from different topic areas and display flexibility and common sense. From there it is a short leap to superintelligent AI,
which is smarter than humans in every respect, even those that now seem firmly in the human domain, such as scientific reasoning and social skills.
Each of us alive today may be one of the last rungs on the evolutionary ladder that leads from the first living cell to synthetic intelligence.
What we are only beginning to realize is that these two forms of superhuman intelligence—alien and artificial—may not be so distinct. The technological
developments we are witnessing today may have all happened before, elsewhere in the universe. The transition from biological to synthetic intelligence
may be a general pattern, instantiated over and over, throughout the cosmos. The universe’s greatest intelligences may be postbiological, having grown
out of civilizations that were once biological. (This is a view I share with Paul Davies, Steven Dick, Martin Rees, and Seth Shostak, among others.)
To judge from the human experience—the only example we have—the transition from biological to postbiological may take only a few hundred years.