[micromacrofoot]

We can’t even go as far to assume that an alien species has anything resembling an ideology! even a brief glimpse of an alien intelligence could be completely incomprehensible to us… we could spend a thousand years trying to decipher a single signal and get nowhere.

People get all worked up about dyson spheres and radio signals, but these are so deeply rooted in the human understanding of things in our tiny tiny slice of the universe.

[Ekaros]

Also even if we got lucky and found AM signal of some alien speech. Would we have any idea how to translate that? My understanding is that we already have human text which we cannot translate. And that has some ties to existing concepts we know of. With truly alien speech we would have zero context or share concepts.

[amelius]

But we could apply GPT-3 and send alien speech back ...

[sph]

Artificial Intelligence is modeled after human intelligence. It's pretty much useless against a true alien mind, unless we imagine aliens as being human-like with a different shaped body.

The beauty of the film Arrival was showing the challenge of interacting with a truly alien language.

[tomcatfish]

Artificial intelligence is modeled after abstractions on the concept of learning, not human thought. We just name things so that they'll be fun and easy to discuss, but (for example) there's no "human neuron" floating around in the matrix math that you see in some popular techniques.

[sph]

Sure, but would GPT-3 be able to interpret dolphin chatter just by somehow using dolphin audio as input? I haven't checked but I'm pretty sure it won't work out of the box and we're still far away from achieving that result. And dolphins are closer to us in type of intelligence (i.e. central neuro-electric mass with peripheral connections mediated by the exact same chemicals) than any hypothetical extraterrestrial species.

[neuronic]

Can you also apply GPT-3 to understand whales and dolphins?

[CryptoPunk]

The laws of physics impose contraints that will make certain traits common amongst intelligence species and advanced civilizations.

We see a variation of this in convergent evolution across distantly related species (e.g. the evolution of wings).

[trasz]

This is obviously not true. We can’t even define what intelligence means, leave alone somebody’s physical traits.

[CryptoPunk]

It's obviously true that convergent evolution, that produces similar traits across distantly related species, occurs. So your assertion makes no sense to me.

[trasz]

Only when it happens in a similar environment.

[CryptoPunk]

Flight evolves all over the planet, across diverse environments.

But in any case, there will be some commonality in environments across many planets, owing to what environments are the most probable hosts of life, and to the fact that the laws of physics are universal.

[trasz]

That works for flight, but not for intelligence. We can define what “flight” means, but we can’t do that for “intelligence”. Unless by “intelligent” you really mean “appears to be behaving like a human”.