Are AI [Artificial Intelligent] agents/aliens visiting Earth via or as UFOs?

Copyright 2016 InterAmerica Inc.

Polymath Ray Kurzweil, in several books and articles, ongoing, has, postulated that alien “species” in the form of AI artifacts may have visited or are visiting this planet.

“Delegates from Faraway Places:

Our popular contemporary vision of visits from other planets in the Universe contemplates creatures like ourselves with spaceships and other advanced technologies assisting them. In some conceptions the aliens have a remarkably humanlike appearance. In others, they look a little strange …

… visits from intelligent entities from another planet represent a merger of an evolved intelligent species with its even more evolved intelligent computational technology …

A computational-based superintelligence of the late twenty-first century here on Earth will be microscopic in size. Thus an intelligent delegation from another planet is not likely to use a spaceship of the size that is common in today’s science fiction … Consider that the purpose of such a visit is not likely to be the mining of material resources since such an advanced civilization has almost certainly passed beyond the point where it any significant material needs … The only likely purpose of such a visit is for observation and the gathering of information. The only resource of interest to such an advanced civilization will be knowledge …” [Pages 257-258, The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence, Penguin Books, NY, 1999]

(Mr. Kurzweil has elaborated on and expanded his view is subsequent books, The Singularity is Near (2005), How To Create a Mind (2013), et cetera which I’ll be bring to this place upcoming).

Wikipedia’s “bio” of Mr. Kurzweil:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Kurzweil

The view that advanced civilizations outside the Earth would evolve similarly to how civilizations have evolved here is gilding the extraterrestrial lily as I see it.

Darwin’s evolutionary theories apply to Earth (only) and is thus a unique proposition.

That is, the vicissitudes of this planet do not and cannot be found elsewhere in the Universe (except by sheer chance which the odds are against, unless one posits that God is the creator of all things; an idea that is not irrational, by the way….but that for another time).

Evolutionary thrusts and the struggle(s) for survival can only apply to this planet; they’d be entirely different elsewhere, where geology, atmosphere, exotic species, and other unique elements intrude.

Technology arose here, not symbiotically, but from the creative minds of men like Babbage, Turing, for computers (which is Mr. Kurzweil’s AI thrust pretty much) and all the men and women who provided thought and effort to make machines,

That such “persons” would arise on another planet is an imaginative stretch that boggles the mind.

Nonetheless, I like the idea that UFOs are vehicles or entities with an AI essence.

(Many UFO sightings in the literature bespeak an AI patina (which I’ve recounted earlier here and will recap when I finish Mr. Bostrom’s upcoming book, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies.)

If an advanced species ended up creating machines that replaced them, one can imagine that the self-replicating, intelligent machines might strike out to search the Galaxy or Universe for like “machines” or intelligences as their own.

Curiosity would not be foreign to an AI species (if I understand Mr. Kurzweil correctly).

If that isn’t amenable to you, how about advanced AI machines from our future?

Machines so advanced as to think and create/maintain themselves would surely, after a spate of time (millions of years or more), have come to understand and control time.

A visit to the past would, like extraterrestrial convoys, would not be a forbidden or undesired foray by any thinking species, AI or otherwise.

The Bostrom book will be published in May and the several Kurzweil books (and others in the AI genre) are tough to digest for one with meager intellectual abilities, like me, but I’ll be giving the topic a going-over, as it does seem to be a possible UFO explanation.

After all, no other explanation stands out.

RR