In the future, Kelly believes that we will encounter “synthetic aliens,” beings that we create, forcing us to deal with the same benefits and challenges that we would expect if we ever established contact with intelligent extraterrestrial aliens from other planets.

2015

“CALL THEM ARTIFICIAL ALIENS”

“The most important thing about making machines that can think is that they will think differently,” writes Kevin Kelly (b. 1942), founding Executive Editor of Wired magazine. In his acclaimed 2015 essay, “Call Them Artificial Aliens,” he noted that “. . . to solve the current grand mysteries of quantum gravity, dark energy, and dark matter, we’ll probably need intelligences other than human. The extremely complex questions that will come after them may require even more distant and complex intelligences. Indeed, we may need to invent intermediate intelligences that can help us design yet more rarified intelligences that we couldn’t design alone.”

So deep and difficult will be questions in the future that they will require numerous different “species of minds” to solve them, along with new human skills to interface with such minds. Kelly concludes his essay by comparing thinking machines with aliens: “AI could just as well stand for Alien Intelligence. We cannot be certain that we’ll contact extra-terrestrial beings . . . in the next 200 years, but we can be almost 100 percent certain that we’ll have manufactured an alien intelligence by then. When we face those synthetic aliens, we’ll encounter the same benefits and challenges we expect from contact with ET. They’ll force us to reevaluate our roles, our beliefs, our goals, our identity.”

We can hardly imagine an antelope understanding the significance of prime numbers, yet alterations of our own brains, along with the development of useful AI interfaces, could admit a variety of profound concepts to which we are now totally closed. If the yucca moth, with only a few ganglia for its brain, can recognize the geometry of the yucca flower from birth, how much of our capacity is hardwired into our convolutions of cortex? Of course, there are likely facets of the universe we can never understand, just as an antelope could never understand calculus, black holes, symbolic logic, or poetry. There are thoughts we can never think, visions we can only glimpse. It is at this filmy, veiled interface between human reality and a reality beyond that we may find the numinous, which some may liken to dancing with the artificial gods.