If the explosion of artificial intelligence weren’t mind-boggling enough, Washington is now confronting the possibility of another, weirder, AI: alien intelligence. After a former intelligence official went public earlier this month with claims that he was told by other officials of a secret government program that possesses downed alien spacecraft, the House Oversight Committee has announced plans for a hearing on the matter. And former deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence Christopher Mellon, now with Harvard’s alien-focused Galileo Project, wrote in POLITICO Magazine that he has referred four people to the Pentagon’s UFO office who say they have knowledge of secret government efforts to study “off-world craft.” The Pentagon has said its UFO program “has not discovered any verifiable information to substantiate” claims about downed craft, and many stories about aliens and UFOs have been shown to result from some combination of delusion, confusion and disinformation. But here at DFD, we like to keep an open mind. After all, magic internet money, killer robots and AI itself were all the stuff of futuristic sci-fi before they became political hot potatoes in the present. And it turns out that AI, in particular, has a thing or two to teach us about the possible existence of its extraterrestrial cousin. To help us wrap our heads around this, we caught up with Ravi Starzl, an AI-focused computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon. Starzl is also an adviser to Americans for Safe Aerospace, an advocacy group founded by former Navy fighter pilot Ryan Graves, who has been calling attention to the UFO phenomenon since reporting a series of sightings that took place in 2014 and 2015 to Congress and the Pentagon. At a practical level, how can AI help with identifying UFOs? I've been helping some organizations develop machine learning algorithms and systems for being able to identify and characterize unknown aerial phenomena based on multimodal domains of data. So visual, textual, audio, radar. Machine learning, and AI in particular, will be able to process the vast quantities of information that exist, make sense of it, and actually turn it into interpretable insights and even actionable information You need to be able to separate hoaxes and fakes from genuine phenomena and machine learning is extremely useful for that. At a more abstract level, Ryan Graves has argued that the process occurring right now, in which human societies are grappling with the rise of AI, will prepare them to grapple with the possible existence of alien intelligence. What do you think? It's dead on. A real value in the current craze is it's forcing people to start to think about the fact that we are not the only cognitive entities operating in our world anymore. They're still not that sophisticated compared to where the fundamentals of that technology can take it. But we can still have a conversation with it right now and it can do work for us and it can give us ideas we didn't have. That process of learning how to interact with a fundamentally alien, if you will, intelligence is going to open the whole zeitgeist up. It sounds like an exciting time to be studying intelligence. We're going to be very busy and living in very interesting times for the next 20 years as these things start to merge, diverge, and get analyzed and brought more into the mainstream. When you say “these things” Do you mean human-created AI, Or are you also talking about possible alien intelligence? I guess in my mind, I'm having a hard time seeing the difference. So, at a certain level, It’s all just different forms of intelligence? This is a question that has been wrestled with, “What does it mean to have the other?” At some level, two humans are alien intelligences. Because one, they each have their own cognitive sphere. They each have their own mental models of reality. And they have to exchange information in order to collaborate. That same phenomenon, like a matryoshka doll, just continues outward when you're dealing with super-organisms like societies. And then from there you have formations interacting with other formations at the superintelligence level. So in many respects the question of, “Is there alien intelligence and how would we deal with it?” has already been answered definitively. Yes, because it's already with us. But now the question becomes how exotic, what processes created it, and how do we establish a more efficient or more consistent or coherent or safe way of interacting with it and understanding it and learning from it?
| 
