Alien Intelligence and the Concept of Technology

“We’re going to launch lots of tiny spacecraft into interstellar space, have them discover alien intelligence, then bring back its technology to advance human technology by a million years”. I’ve heard some pretty wacky startup pitches over the years, but this might possibly be the all-time winner.

But as I thought about it, I realized that beyond the “absurdly extreme moonshot” character of this pitch, there’s some science that I’ve done that makes it clear that it’s also fundamentally philosophically confused. The nature of the confusion is interesting, however, and untangling it will give us an opportunity to illuminate some deep features of both intelligence and technology—and in the end suggest a way to think about the long-term trajectory of the very concept of technology and its relation to our universe.

Let’s start with a scenario. Let’s say one of the little spacecraft comes across a planet where it sees complicated swirling patterns:

The spacecraft sends out a probe to “make contact”. The swirling pattern “responds” by changing slightly. The spacecraft analyzes the change, and sends out another probe. And pretty soon there’s a whole “conversation” going on between the spacecraft and the planet. But, you might say, that’s nothing like an “intelligence” there; there’s just a “pure physical system” that operates through physical laws.

OK, but now let’s imagine the spacecraft has returned to Earth and is checking it out. It detects complicated patterns of radio signals. It sends out a radio signal of its own. Something on Earth responds. A “conversation” ensues. Maybe the spacecraft is “talking to” a cellphone tower, doing automated handshakes with it. Maybe it reached a ham radio operator, and is exchanging Morse code with them. Or maybe—in an ultimate version of code injection—there’s a computer that’s interpreting the spacecraft’s signals as a program, and is sending back the results of running the program.

It all seems quite sophisticated—and at some level worthy of the technological civilization we’ve built up here on Earth. But let’s zoom out a bit. There’s something coming from the spacecraft, that’s causing something to happen on Earth, that’s causing something to be returned to the spacecraft.

And ultimately whatever is happening on Earth must be a physical process of some kind—operating according to the laws of physics. So what’s the difference between this and those swirling “just physics” patterns that the spacecraft found on the other planet? Everything is ultimately “just physics” after all.

OK, you might say, that’s surely true. But on Earth, even though we might have started from physics, we’ve somehow now “ascended” through chemistry and biology and technology to get to something that’s fundamentally more sophisticated. But here we run into an important—if at first surprising—piece of basic science: my Principle of Computational Equivalence.

Let’s say we represent all those “physical processes” as computations (and our Physics Project implies that all of physics is indeed ultimately computational). Now we can compare the computations that correspond to the planet with the swirling patterns to the ones that correspond to our Earth with us humans in the loop.

And what the Principle of Computational Equivalence tells us is that they’re ultimately equivalent. The computations associated with the swirling patterns are ultimately just as sophisticated as the ones we achieve with our brains and our technology here on Earth. It’s far from obvious that this would be true. But it’s something one discovers when one explores the computational universe of possible programs.

One might think that simple programs would produce only simple behavior, and that somehow the behavior would get progressively more complex with more complicated programs. But that’s not what one finds.