The World Still Hasn't Made Sense of ChatGPT OpenAI's chaos machine turns three. Listen to more stories on the Noa app. O n this day three years ago, OpenAI released what it referred to internally as a "low-key research preview." This preview was so low-key that, inside OpenAI, staff were instructed not to frame it as a product launch. Some OpenAI employees were nervous that the company was rushing out an unfinished product, but CEO Sam Altman forged ahead, hoping to beat a competitor to market and to see how everyday people might use the company's AI.

Are you sure that chatbot isn't alive? Listen to more stories on the Noa app. O ne of the persistent questions in our brave new world of generative AI: If a chatbot is conversant like a person, if it reasons and behaves like one, then is it possibly conscious like a person? Geoffrey Hinton, a recent Nobel Prize winner and one of the so-called godfathers of AI, told the journalist Andrew Marr earlier this year that AI has become so advanced and adept at reasoning that "we're now creating beings." Hinton links an AI's ability to "think" and act on behalf of a person to consciousness: The difference between the organic neurons in our head and the synthetic neural networks of a chatbot is effectively meaningless, he said: "They are alien intelligences."

An alien species is headed for planet Earth and we have no reason to believe it will be friendly. Some experts predict it will get here within 30 years, while others insist it will arrive far sooner. Nobody knows what it will look like, but it will share two key traits with us humans – it will be intelligent and self-aware. No, this alien will not come from a distant planet – it will be born right here on Earth, hatched in a research lab at a major university or large corporation. I am referring to the first artificial general intelligence (AGI) that reaches (or exceeds) human-level cognition.

In the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), we've often looked for signs of intelligence, technology and communication that are similar to our own. But as astronomer and SETI trailblazer Jill Tarter points out, that approach means searching for detectable technosignatures, like radio transmissions, not searching for intelligence. Now scientists are considering whether artificial intelligence (AI) could help us search for alien intelligence in ways we haven't even thought of yet. As we think about extraterrestrial intelligence it's helpful to remember humans are not the only intelligent life on Earth. Chimpanzees have culture and use tools, spiders process information with webs, cetaceans have dialects, crows understand analogies and beavers are great engineers.

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. In the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), we've often looked for signs of intelligence, technology and communication that are similar to our own. But as astronomer and SETI trailblazer Jill Tarter points out, that approach means searching for detectable technosignatures, like radio transmissions, not searching for intelligence. Now scientists are considering whether artificial intelligence (AI) could help us search for alien intelligence in ways we haven't even thought of yet. As we think about extraterrestrial intelligence it's helpful to remember humans are not the only intelligent life on Earth.

Lord Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal and University of Cambridge Emeritus Professor of Cosmology and Astrophysics, believes that machines could surpass humans within a few hundred years, ushering in eons of domination. He also cautions that while we will certainly discover more about the origins of biological life in the coming decades, we should recognize that alien intelligence may be electronic. "Just because there's life elsewhere doesn't mean that there is intelligent life," Lord Rees told The Conversation. "My guess is that if we do detect an alien intelligence, it will be nothing like us. It will be some sort of electronic entity."

It's a frightening thought, but there are many experts in the field of Alien visitation and space exploration who believe that the earth will be visited by a form of Alien Intelligence that is vastly superior to that of it's own. This seems to be something that all who have studied it agree upon even if they can't pin point exactly when it will happen. Some think it will be in 50 years while others claim it will happen in actually 20 instead. In any case, there is concern that this from of Alien Intelligence could be a potential threat to man kind. Yes, at first this AI could seem quite harmless, but there are predictions that once the AI starts to study the earth and its inhabitants, this could all change.

That's how long radio astronomer Frank D. Drake pointed the 26-meter telescope at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) research facility in Green Bank, West Virginia, towards the heavens, looking for signs of intelligent life beyond Earth. He dubbed his efforts Project Ozma, in honor of the Queen of Oz from L. Frank Baum's famed children's book series. Between April and July of 1960, Drake recorded some 150 hours of tape speckled with radio noise. While no meaningful encoded signals or patterns emerged from those readings, Drake still earned himself a place in history for performing what would become the first scientific search for extraterrestrial intelligence in the modern era. Since then, research organizations around the world have performed nearly 100 SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) experiments.

Because of a quirk in our evolutionary history, we are cruising as the only self-conscious species on our planet, leaving us with the incorrect idea that human intelligence is singular. Our own intelligence is a society of intelligences, and this suite occupies only a small corner of the many types of intelligences and consciousnesses that are possible in the universe. We like to call our human intelligence "general purpose," because compared with other kinds of minds we have met, it can solve more types of problems, but as we build more and more synthetic minds we'll come to realize that human thinking is not general at all. It is only one species of thinking. The kind of thinking done by the emerging AIs today is already somewhat unlike human thinking.

Imagine a flying saucer lands in Time Square and an alien steps out. He's a competitive fellow, so he arrives armed with a board game in hand – the game of Go. He walks up the first person he passes and says the classic line, "Take me to your best player." We humans are competitive too, so a tournament is quickly arranged. The alien is surprisingly confident.