Iskander Rehman
In 1961, the Brookings Institution produced an advisory report for NASA, which pondered, among other things, the societal ramifications of the discovery of intelligent extraterrestrial life. The announcement of such a dramatic discovery, the report suggested, could have hugely unpredictable effects on human civilisation, and – in extenso – on US national security. While ‘the knowledge that life existed in other parts of the universe might lead to a greater unity of men on Earth, based on the “oneness” of man or on the age-old assumption that any stranger is threatening’, such an earth-shattering revelation could also have dramatic societal consequences, the Brookings team suggested. People might find their entire religious belief systems upended almost overnight, and, of all groups, ‘scientists and engineers might be the most devastated by the discovery of superior creatures’, as their ‘advanced understanding of nature might vitiate all our theories’.
The advent of an Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) or Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) – i.e., an advanced form of AI that surpasses human capabilities in almost every cognitive field of endeavour – is perhaps the closest analogue to the public discovery of an advanced alien intelligence. It is also far more likely to occur over the course of our lifetimes, with many titans of industry and lead forecasting platforms now predicting its materialisation within the next five to ten years.
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