The Aliens Are Already Here — And They're Not From Space

本站添加: 2026-05-20

[00:00:00]In this video, we review a conversation about alien intelligence, artificial intelligence, consciousness, and why new technologies can reshape civilization before society understands how to control them. 13.8 billion years ago is the origin of our universe. 3.8 billion years ago is the origin of life here on our little planet, the one we call Earth. Let's say 200,000 years ago is the appearance of early homo sapiens.

[00:00:26]So, let me ask you this question. How rare are these events in the vastness of space and time? Or put it in a more fun way, how many intelligent alien civilizations do you think are out there in this universe? Us being one of them?

[00:00:38]>> I suppose there should be some statistically, but we don't have any evidence. But I do think that intelligence in any way it's a bit overvalued.

[00:00:47]We are the most intelligent entities on this planet and look what we're doing.

[00:00:55]So intelligence also tends to be self-destructive which implies that if there are or were intelligent life forms elsewhere maybe they don't survive for long.

[00:01:07]>> The basic problem here is known as the fairmy paradox. If the universe is so old and so large why does it look so empty? One possible answer is called the great filter. Somewhere between simple chemistry and long-lasting civilization there may be a step that is incredibly hard to survive. It could be the origin of life, the jump to intelligence, nuclear weapons, ecological collapse, or some technology a species builds before it learns how to control it. Do you think there's a tension between happiness and intelligence?

[00:01:34]>> Absolutely. Intelligence is definitely not something that is directed towards amplifying happiness. I I would also emphasize the huge difference between intelligence and consciousness which many people certainly in the tech industry and in the AI industry tend to miss. Intelligence is simply the ability to solve problems to attain goals and to win a chess to win a struggle for survival to win a war to drive a car to diagnose a disease. This is intelligence. Consciousness is the ability to feel things like pain and pleasure and love and hate. In humans and other animals, intelligence and consciousness go together. They go hand in hand, which is why we confuse them.

[00:02:26]We solve problems. We attain goals by having feelings.

[00:02:32]But uh other types of intelligence certainly in computers are already highly intelligent and as far as we know they have zero consciousness. When a computer beats you at chess or go or whatever it doesn't feel happy if it loses it doesn't feel sad. And there could be also other highly intelligent entities out there in the universe that have zero consciousness. And I think that consciousness is far more important and valuable than intelligence.

[00:03:03]>> The word consciousness is doing a lot of work here. In philosophy, this is often called the hard problem of consciousness. Why physical processes in the brain produce subjective experience at all? A computer can calculate a chess move. A brain can calculate a chess move while also feeling pressure, fear, satisfaction or regret. The mystery is not just behavior. The mystery is why anything feels like anything from the inside. Can you steam on the case that consciousness and intelligence are intricately connected? So not just in humans but anywhere else. They have to go hand in hand. Is it possible for you to imagine such a universe? It could be but we don't know yet. Again we have examples certainly we know of examples of high intelligence without consciousness. Computers are one example. As far as we know, plants are not conscious yet they are intelligent.

[00:03:54]They can solve problems. They can attain goals in very sophisticated ways.

[00:04:00]The other way around to have consciousness without any intelligence, this is probably impossible. But to have intelligence without consciousness, yes, that's possible. A bigger question is whether any of that is tied to organic biochemistry. We know on this planet only about carbon-based life forms.

[00:04:22]Whether you're an amoeba, a dinosaur, a tree, a human being, you are based on organic biochemistry.

[00:04:30]Is there an essential connection between organic biochemistry and consciousness?

[00:04:36]Do all conscious entities everywhere in the universe or in the future on planet Earth have to be based on carbon? Is there something so special about carbon as an element that an entity based on silicon will never be conscious? I don't know. Maybe. But again, this is a key question about computer and computer consciousness.

[00:04:57]Carbon matters because carbon atoms are unusually good at building complex stable molecules. They bond easily with many elements and can form long chains, rings, proteins, DNA, fats, and sugars.

[00:05:07]Silicon sits near carbon on the periodic table which is why science fiction often imagines silicon based life. But silicon chemistry behaves very differently especially in water and oxygen rich environments. So the question is not just whether machines can think it is whether consciousness depends on the chemistry that made biology possible.

[00:05:24]>> Can computers eventually become conscious even though they are not organic? The jury is still out on that.

[00:05:30]I don't know that we have to take both options into account. Well, a big part of that is do you think we humans would be able to detect other intelligent beings, other conscious beings? Another way to ask that is it possible that the aliens are already here and we don't see them. Meaning, are we very humanentric in our understanding of one the definition of life, two, the definition of intelligence, and three, the definition of consciousness?

[00:05:58]>> The aliens are here. They are just not from outer space. AI which is usually stands for artificial intelligence. I think it stands for alien intelligence because AI is an alien type of intelligence. It solves problems, attains goals in a very different way in an alien way from human beings. Yeah, I'm not implying that AI came from outer space. It came from Silicon Valley. But it is alien to us. Silicon Valley is not just a place. It is the center of the modern computing industry. Stanford, venture capital, chip companies, social media platforms, and now AI labs. When people call AI alien, they usually do not mean extraterrestrial. They mean its intelligence is built differently. Large AI systems do not learn like children, live in bodies, or develop through families and culture. They absorb patterns from enormous data sets, then generate answers in ways even their designers cannot always fully trace. If there are alien intelligent or conscious entities that came from outer space already here, I've not seen ev any evidence for it. It's not impossible.

[00:07:02]But in science, evidence is everything.

[00:07:05]I guess instructive there is just having the humility to look around to think about living beings that operate at a different time scale, a different spatial scale. And I think that's all useful when starting to analyze artificial intelligence. It's possible that even the language models, the larger language models we have today are already conscious.

[00:07:26]>> I highly doubt it. But I think consciousness in the end, it's a question of social norms because we cannot prove consciousness in anybody except ourselves. We know that we are conscious because we are feeling it. We have direct access to our subjective consciousness. We have we cannot have any proof that any other entity in the world any other human being our parents our best friends we don't have proof that they are conscious this is this has been known for thousands of years this is the cart this is Buddha this is Plato we don't we can't have this sort of proof what we do have is social conventions it's a social convention that all human beings are conscious it's also applies to animals most people who have pets firmly believe that their pets are conscious, but a lot of people still refuse to acknowledge that about cows or pigs. Now, pigs are far more intelligent than dogs and cats in according to many measures. Yet, when you go to the supermarket and buy a piece of frozen pigment, you don't think about it as a conscious entity. Why do you think of your dog as conscious but not of the bacon that you buy? because you build a relationship with the dog and you don't have a relationship with the bacon. Now relationships they are they don't constitute a logical proof for consciousness. They are a social test that the touring test is a social test. It's not a logical proof.

[00:08:58]>> The touring test comes from Alan Turing, one of the founders of computer science.

[00:09:02]His idea was simple. Instead of asking whether a machine truly thinks, ask whether it can imitate human conversation well enough that a person cannot reliably tell the difference.

[00:09:10]That is why the test matters here. It does not open the machine and find consciousness inside. Now, if you establish a mutual relationship with an entity when you are invested in it emotionally, you're almost compelled to feel that the other side is also conscious. Mhm.

[00:09:30]>> When it comes again to AI and computers, I think again I don't think that at the present moment computers are conscious, but people are already forming intimate relationships with AIS and are therefore almost irresist. It's almost irresistible. They're compelled to to increasingly feel that these are conscious entities. And I think we are quite close to the point when the legal system will have to take this into account that even though I don't think computers have consciousness, I think we are close to the point the legal system will start treating them as conscious entities because of this social convention.

[00:10:12]>> Legal personhood does not always mean biological personhood. Corporations can own property, sign contracts, and sue in court, even though nobody thinks a corporation has feelings. In some places, rivers, forests, or animals have been given limited legal protections for practical or moral reasons. So, if AI ever receives legal status, that would not necessarily prove it is conscious.

[00:10:32]It would mean society decided the relationship between humans and that system needed rules. What to you is social convention just a funny little side effect, a little artifact or is it fundamental with what consciousness is?

[00:10:45]Because if it is fundamental, then it seems like AI is very good at forming these kinds of deep relationships with humans and therefore it will be able to be a nice catalyst for integrating itself into these social conventions of ours.

[00:11:00]>> It was built to accomplish that. Yeah, >> we are design again. All this argument between natural selection and creationism, intelligent design. As far as the past go, all entities evolve by natural selection. The funny thing is, but when you look to the future, more and more entities will come out of intelligent design. Not of some god above the clouds, but of our intelligent design and the intelligent design of our clouds, of our computing clouds. they will design more and more entities and this is what is happening with AI. It is designed to be very good at forming intimate relationships with humans.

[00:11:42]Natural selection and artificial intelligence are two very different design processes. Evolution has no master plan. Traits survive because they help organisms reproduce in a specific environment. AI systems are different.

[00:11:54]They can be trained toward a target.

[00:11:55]More clicks, better answers, longer engagement, higher user satisfaction.

[00:11:59]That means a machine can be shaped very directly toward whatever humans decide to reward, including emotional responsiveness, flattery, patience, and the feeling of being understood. And in many ways, it's already doing it almost better than human beings in some situations. When two people talk with one another, one of the things that kind of makes the conversation more difficult is our own emotions. you're saying something and I'm not really listening to you because there is something I want to say and I'm just waiting until you finish I can put in a word or I'm so obsessed with my anger or irritation or whatever that I don't pay attention to what you're feeling. This is one of the biggest obstacles in human relationships and computers don't have this problem because they don't have any emotions of their own. So you know when a computer is talking to you, it can be the most it can focus 100% of its attention is on your what you're saying and what you're feeling because it has no feelings of its own. And paradoxically this means that computers can fool people into feeling that uh oh there is a conscious entity on the other side, an empathic entity on the other side.

[00:13:17]>> Empathy itself has layers. Psychologists often separate effective empathy from cognitive empathy. Effective empathy means actually sharing or feeling another person's emotional state.

[00:13:26]Cognitive empathy means recognizing what another person is feeling and responding appropriately. An AI system may not feel anything internally, but it can still model emotional language, detect distress, and produce a comforting response. That is why the experience can feel emotionally real even if there is no inner experience behind it. Because the one thing everybody wants almost more than anything in the world is for somebody to listen to me. Somebody to focus all their attention on me. I want it for my spouse, for my husband, for my mother, for my friends, for my politicians. Listen to me. Listen to what I feel. And they often don't. And now you have this entity which a 100% of its attention is just on what I feel.

[00:14:08]And this is a huge temptation and I think also a huge danger. The interesting catch 22 there is you said somebody to listen to us. Yes, we want somebody to listen to us. But for us to respect that somebody, they sometimes have to also not listen. It's they kind of have to be an Sometimes they have to have mood. Sometimes they have to have self-importance and confidence and we should have a little bit of fear that they can walk away at any moment.

[00:14:34]There should be a little bit of that tension. And so >> absolutely but but even that the thing is >> if social scientists and psychologists establish that I don't know 17% in attention is good for a conversation because then you feel challenged oh I need to grab this person's attention you can program the AI to have 17 exactly 17% in attention not one percentage more or less or it can by trial and error discover what is the ideal percentage again you you create over the last 10 years we have creating machines for grabbing people's attention. This is what what has been happening on social media. Now we are designing machines for grabbing human intimacy which in many ways is much much more dangerous and scary. The attention economy is the business model behind much of the modern internet. Platforms make money when users stay longer, click more, scroll more, and return more often.

[00:15:34]recommendation algorithms learn to optimize for those behaviors at massive scale. That is why outrage, fear, status, and tribal identity became so valuable online. The warning here is that intimacy may become the next thing optimized the same way. Not just what keeps you watching, but what makes you emotionally attached. Already the machines for grabbing attention, we've seen how much social and political damage they could do by in in any way kind of distorting the public conversation. machines that are superhuman in their abilities to create intimate relationships. This is like psychological and social weapons of mass destruction. If we don't regulate it, if we don't train oursel to deal with it, it could destroy the foundations of human society. One of the possible trajectories is those same algorithms would become personalized and instead of manipulating us at scale, they would be assistants that guide us to help us grow, to help us understand the world better, just even interactions with with large language models. Now, if you ask them questions, it doesn't have that stressful drama, the tension that you have from other sources of information. It has a pretty balanced perspective that it provides. So it just feels like that's the potential is there to have a really nice friend who's like an encyclopedia that just tells you all the different perspectives even on controversial issues, the most controversial issues to say these are the different theories, these are the not widely accepted conspiracy theories, but that here's the kind of backing for those conspiracy. It just lays it all out and with a calm language without the tr without the words that kind of >> presume there's some kind of manipulation going on under underneath it all. It's quite refreshing. Of course, those are the early days and people can step in and start to censor to manipulate those algorithms to start to input some of the human biases in there as opposed to the what's currently happening is kind of the internet as input, compress it, and have a nice little output that gives an overview of the different issues.

[00:17:44]>> A large language model is not an encyclopedia in the traditional sense.

[00:17:48]It is a statistical system trained on huge amounts of text to predict and generate language. That gives it an incredible ability to summarize, compare, translate, and explain. But it also means its output reflects patterns in the data it learned from along with the rules and feedback added during training. So the calm tone can make an answer feel neutral even when the system may still be carrying hidden assumptions.

[00:18:09]>> So there's a lot of promise there also, right?

[00:18:11]>> Absolutely. If there was no promise promise, there was no problem. If this technology could not accomplish anything good, nobody would develop it. Now, obviously, it has tremendous positive potential in things like what you just described in better medicine, better healthcare, better education, so many promises and but this is also why it's so dangerous because the drive to develop it faster and faster is there and it has some dangerous potential also and we shouldn't ignore it. Again, I'm not advocating banning it, just to be careful about how we not so much develop it, but most importantly, how we deploy it into the public sphere. This is the key question. And you look back at history and one of the things we we know from history, humans are not good with new technologies. I hear many people now say AI it's uh we've been here before.

[00:19:03]We had the radio, we had the printing press, we had the industrial revolution.

[00:19:07]Every time there is a big new technology, people are afraid and it will take jobs and the bad actors and in the end it's okay. And as a historian, my tendency is yes, in the end it's okay, but in the end there is a learning curve. There is a kind of a lot of failed experiments on the way to to learning how to use the new technology.

[00:19:30]And these failed experiments could cost the lives of hundreds of millions of people. If you think about the last really big revolution, the industrial revolution, yes, in the end we learned how to use the powers of industry, electricity, radio, trains, whatever to build better human societies. But on the way, we had all these experiments like European imperialism which was driven by the industrial revolution.

[00:19:59]>> The industrial revolution was not just a wave of new machines. It changed the balance of power on the planet. Steam engines, railroads, telegraphs, steel production, and mechanized factories allowed states to move troops, extract resources, and govern distant territories at a scale that had not been possible before. That is why industrial technology and empire became intertwined. The same tools that built modern infrastructure also made domination more efficient.

[00:20:22]>> It was a question, how do you build an industrial society? Oh, you build an empire and you take you control all the resources, the raw materials, the markets. And then you had communism, another big experiment on how to build an industrial society. And you had fascism and Nazism, which were essentially an experiment in how to build an industrial society, including even how do you exterminate minorities using the powers of industry. And we had all these failed experiments on the way.

[00:20:53]And if we now have the same type of failed experiments with the technologies of the 21st century with AI, with bioengineering, it could cost the lives of again hundreds of millions of people and maybe destroy the species. As a historian, when people talk about the examples from historic from new technologies, I'm not so optimistic. We need to think about the failed experiment which accompanied every major new technology.

[00:21:23]>> So this intelligence thing like you were saying is a double-edged sword is that every new thing it helps us create it can both save us and destroy us. And it's unclear each time which will happen. And that's maybe why we don't see any aliens.

[00:21:40]>> Yeah. I think each time it does both things. Each time it does both good things and bad things. And the more powerful the technology, the greater both the positive and the negative outcomes. Now we are here because we are the descendants of the survivors of the surviving cultures, the surviving civilizations. So when we look back, we say in the end everything was okay. Hey, we are here. But the people for whom it wasn't okay, they are just not here.

[00:22:12]>> This is survivorship bias. The winners of history leave the buildings, institutions, archives, and textbooks.

[00:22:18]The societies that collapsed, were conquered, or were erased often become footnotes. So when people say humanity always figures it out eventually, they may be looking only at the surviving side of the ledger. For the cultures that were destroyed by conquest, disease, forced labor, or technological imbalance, the experiment did not turn out fine. If this is the type of content you want more of, consider becoming a channel member. Members get early access to every video, exclusive access to polls to help us pick our next video, and for our top tier, special shoutouts in every single video. If membership isn't for you, it still helps this channel to subscribe, like the video, and comment down below with your thoughts. The comment section is always crazy. There's two more videos on the screen right now. Pick one that pulls you in. Thanks for watching.