Extraterrestrial

Alien robots may account for the Fermi paradox

By T.K. Randall
May 30, 2018 ·  31 comments

Could an unstoppable AI have wiped out all intelligent life ? Image Credit: CC BY 2.0 Dick Thomas Johnson The question of whether we are alone in the universe remains one of the biggest philosophical conundrums of our time. While it seems almost inconceivable that our civilization is alone in the cosmos, the fact still remains that we have yet to see any evidence to the contrary.

The Fermi paradox, which highlights the contradiction between the likely existence of extraterrestrial civilizations and the fact that we have still never encountered any, seems to suggest that either there are no aliens out there, that they have simply never found us, or that they are extremely rare.

Now theoretical physicist Alexander Berezin from the National Research University of Electronic Technology in Russia has come up with another possible explanation, one that, in addition to addressing the Fermi paradox, also echoes concerns about the dangers of AI research.His theory suggests that a runaway artificial intelligence could potentially become so overwhelmingly unstoppable that it may have already managed to wipe out all intelligent alien life in the cosmos.

"The incentive to grab all available resources is strong, and it only takes one bad actor to ruin the equilibrium, with no possibility to prevent them from appearing at interstellar scale," he said.

"One rogue AI can potentially populate the entire supercluster with copies of itself, turning every solar system into a supercomputer, and there is no use asking why it would do that."

"All that matters is that it can."

Source: Inquisitr.com | Comments (31)

Tags: Extraterrestrial