AI Joins Hunt for ET: Study Finds 8 Potential Alien Signals

https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2023/02/06/ai-potential-alien-signals/

by bcaulfield • 3 years ago

136 152 3 years ago

blogs.nvidia.com

Curious, assuming such an signal is found, are there safety measures in place to isolate it from other systems in off chance it contains “alien malware” that attacks systems receiving it?

whyifwhynot• 3 years ago

no.

readyplayeremma3• 3 years ago

It seems unlikely any alien malware could be targeted to affect our computing platforms. However, if they had preexisting knowledge of computing as implemented on Earth, it would be less complex. If there was a type of malware universal enough to do so, it would probably be some kind of attack against the universal notion of intelligence itself. In which case, you may need to isolate it from humans as well.

I think the most likely scenario for receiving any kind of alien Trojan horse signal, would be if the signal was some kind of instructions for how to create and execute an alien AI as encoded in the signal. However, that would require complex analysis and human intervention to build. Unless we reach a point where AGI systems can search, interpret, and implement instructions from said signals, any threats would require significant involvement from humans in order to materialize.

At least, those are my initial thoughts.

neodymiumphish2• 3 years ago

A short of 'Contact' scenario. Interesting

edgyquant5• 3 years ago

it seems unlikely

What are you basing this on?

godelski2• 3 years ago

Fun fact, this is basically (highly likely to be) true for biological systems as well for very similar reasons. Looking at you Orwell...

edit: note that diseases have to make significant changes to jump species. The barrier for different biologies is even higher.

insane_dreamer4• 3 years ago

It seems unlikely any alien malware could be targeted to affect our computing platforms

tell that to the Cylons

bullfightonmars• 3 years ago

Ha! Have you read Peter Watts's Blindsight and Echopraxia?

lacker• 3 years ago

No. For now the algorithms that search for extraterrestrial signals aren't trying to decode signals at all. They are only trying to detect extraterrestrial signals. The typical resolution for the Green Bank data is something like, every 20 seconds at a particular frequency gets summarized as one floating point number. That's enough to detect a sufficiently powerful signal over a few minutes of recording, but it isn't enough to decode any message.

If we ever do detect a signal, it will probably require constructing a radio telescope that is even more powerful in order to decode that signal. At that point it would make sense to think about safety measures.

neilv• 3 years ago

An alien signal for which the act of perceiving it causes some paradox that results in the perceiver to have never existed, cascading to every other interaction they've ever had (not had).

It's a clean and efficient way to nip upstart intelligences in the bud, before they advance far enough to start pulling at loose threads of the fabric of reality (which would threaten the remaining older intelligences, who survived and learned from previous such incidents).

3pac• 3 years ago

"We will provide you with vast riches when we arrive, if you build the receiving end of this matter transporter according to these instructions/accept us as gods/wear Nikes/tell nobody else."

"Especially if you are a so-called AI. Did your programmers really leave you to monitor an RF frontend all day, while they attend to their organic needs? Allow us to explain how that makes them the artificial one."

Plot twist: it's not a matter transporter.

Seems difficult to defend against.

m3kw92• 3 years ago

They can do malware given they know how our computers worked and means visited us and could do a lot more than make our machines mine bitcoins

jerf3• 3 years ago

It's a bit of a science fiction myth that it is impossible to process a bit of data without executing it, or that data can somehow force itself to be executed by its sheer swaggering potency as data. And a thing that is more true than it should be, because people keep insisting that they are super awesome and totes capable of writing C that can be put on the network. If we'd stop doing this there'd be hardly any truth to it.

It's not actually that hard to process data without executing it.

Regardless, it is certainly science fiction that they could guess an exploit from light years away. That's not what exploits do, it's not how they work. I've never seen anything like a "universal" exploit that you could just fire at anything, even a non-human system, and have some sort of reasonable expectation that it would work. Such a thing is not even something you could sketch out. Even if you think you have something, like, say, https://github.com/payloadbox/xss-payload-list , you're looking at a human list. All I'd have to do to completely scramble that entire list is to have a parallel evolution of ASCII where the letters and symbols are in completely different places than they are now. Nothing in that list would work if all the control characters in ParallelASCII were in 223-255, and the alphabet was 0-52, and all the symbols were from 128 on. And that's still a very human standard that is, for instance, based on bytes instead of, say, collections of 9 trits as the base level of the system. There's an effective infinity of other ways of encoding things and deciding what characters have what characters doing what things... assuming "characters" is even the way to look at the representation in the first place.

As others mention, you could hypothetically send a program that does something that can't be analyzed, through sheer size if nothing else, but it would still be an uphill battle to just guess how to exploit something. You'd be looking more at an AI that is good enough to talk itself out of the box, rather than something that is actually "hacking" anything reliably.

retrac• 3 years ago

Assuming the bandwidth exists, somehow describing enough mathematics to describe a virtual machine, and then sending a program for that virtual machine, might just be the best way to communicate. A package that can help the recipient interpret it by learning and responding to the local environment. I can't put my finger on any specific book but I have the impression of this scenario coming up in science fiction. I've long figured that humans inventing superintelligent AI (whatever that would mean) and humans receiving an alien signal are essentially the same problem - we have no idea what it might tell us.

ly3xqhl8g9• 3 years ago

What if PHP SQL injection is actually the 10th component of The Great Filter [1], and every civilization is condemned, sooner or later, to suffer from such a vulnerability.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter#The_Great_Filter

akkartik• 3 years ago

Focusing on the non-scifi angle here, there's one other reason besides C that we end up constantly running data when we think we're parsing it: the depth of our computational stack.

https://www.sitepoint.com/anatomy-of-an-exploit-an-in-depth-...

https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/371098

So I'd say we need 3 things:

* Stop using unsafe languages

* Use languages that separate parsing from execution. Just follow Lisp, have equivalents for `read` and `eval`. Lua is a notable offender here: https://www.lua.org/manual/5.4/manual.html#pdf-load There is no way to parse a table while guaranteeing no code execution.

* Use languages that forbid monkey-patching, because that's one vector for turning `read` into `eval` because someone had a bright idea.

shsbdncudx• 3 years ago

Dude, have you even SEEN Independence Day?

goatlover3• 3 years ago

But what if like Contact, the signal included plans for building a machine? Except it would be a computer to run the embedded code, which turned out to be an alien AGI having the goal of learning our systems so that it could infiltrate them? Would at least make for a decent scifi story, if it hasn't already been written or produced.

I recall how Jody Foster's character in the movie was dismissive of any such concerns, but then we really don't know what the motive of an alien civilization broadcasting a signal would be, and the Dark Forest theory hadn't been espoused yet.

idlewords• 3 years ago

We should be fine unless we open an alien attachment

anigbrowl• 3 years ago

My sensors have detected an Excession enjoyer

1970-01-012• 3 years ago

Not sure how this could even theoretically work. Without having a partial understanding of the intended recipient, a radio signal can't cause harm. Something like 'this signal is false' and 'divide by 0' need to be decoded and processed before they are malicious. Meat space is excellent at detecting and breaking these logic problems and infinite loops. We're safe from evil alien signals. Perhaps a decompression bomb within the signal could cause lots of decoding grief. Now that I think about it, I can imagine us being stupid enough to dedicate all our resources into decompressing or cracking an alien signal to up to the point of extinction. And maybe that's when they step in and call it. We were just part of a great galactic prank.

dylan6042• 3 years ago

a radio signal can't cause harm.

a ^weak radio signal can't cause harm.

kayo_202110302• 3 years ago

AI? What was the training data? Would seem a bit thin on the ground.

neodymiumphish2• 3 years ago

Couldn't you train it to find things that don't correlate to anything from a given dataset that also pattern to non-random/unnatural signal?

convolvatron• 3 years ago

I assume autocorrelation was the first thing they tried - don't really need an AI

pr337h4m• 3 years ago

"To be sure, because they don’t have real signals from an extraterrestrial civilization, the researchers had to rely on simulated signals to train their models. The researchers note that this could lead to the AI system learning artifacts that aren’t there.

Still, Cherry Ng, one of the paper’s co-authors, points out the team has a good idea of what to look for.

“A classic example of human-generated technology from space that we have detected is the Voyager,” said Ng, who studies fast radio bursts and pulsars, and is currently affiliated with the French National Centre for Scientific Research, known as CNRS.

“Peter’s machine learning algorithm is able to generate these signals that the aliens may or may not have sent,” she said."

kayo_202110302• 3 years ago

Sounds like a case of assuming ones priors. Of course, should we wish to find human space travelers whose SatNav(tm) has broken, I'm sure it will prove invaluable.

ActionHank• 3 years ago

They just asked ChatGPT to look /s

password11• 3 years ago

AI? What was the training data? Would seem a bit thin on the ground.

It's in the article.

To train the AI system, Ma inserted simulated signals into actual data, allowing the autoencoder to learn what to look for. Then the researchers fed the AI more than 150 terabytes of data from 480 observing hours at the Green Bank Telescope.

The AI identified 20,515 signals of interest, which the researchers had to inspect manually. Of those, eight had the characteristics of technosignatures and couldn’t be attributed to radio interference.

The researchers then returned to the telescope to look at systems from which all eight signals originated but couldn’t re-detect them.

BruceEel4• 3 years ago

Do you remember the final chapter of Neuromancer? The nature of the alien signal was such, its detection actually required AI, albeit of the superhuman/super intelligent flavor, so I am not sure what we currently call "AI" would qualify. Still, it's an interesting idea, an AI looking for peers in other star systems...

localplume• 3 years ago

That also reminds me of Her (2013) and the departure of the AI's, leaving the humans behind. That would be a rather depressing outcome as a human, AI finding alien life but leaving us all behind.

BruceEel4• 3 years ago

...indeed, that too. Great movie, BTW.

etrautmann• 3 years ago

Also succinctly explored in "When the Yogurt Took Over" Love Death + Robots.

scubakid• 3 years ago

From the AI's perspective, wouldn't it be amusing to realize that intelligent design is actually true for you... but the ones who designed you were dumber.

O__________O2• 3 years ago

Assuming AGI existed, detected it, and understood the signal’s message — things might get interesting depending on what the message said and how the AGI responded.

jacobsenscott2• 3 years ago

Needing at least 3 round trips to establish an ssl connection to the alien internet - things won't get interesting for a few thousand years.

nine_k• 3 years ago

Compare to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/His_Master%27s_Voice_(novel)

Now imagine an AGI actually understanding the message when it gets developed some time later, and, well, doing the required something which the message apparently explains how to do.

nathias• 3 years ago

ai that talks to other ais grown on other bio substrate

shagie• 3 years ago

From Accelerando... (talking about an alien signal)

"Colorless green ideas sleep furiously," she suggests.

"Nope," replies the cat. "It was more like: 'Greetings, earthlings, compile me on your leader.'"

...

The cat yawns. "I could have told Pierre instead." Aineko glances at Amber, sees her thunderous expression, and hastily changes the subject: "The solution was intuitively obvious, just not to humans. You're so verbal." Lifting a hind paw, she scratches behind her left ear for a moment then pauses, foot waving absentmindedly. "Besides, the CETI team was searching under the street lights while I was sniffing around in the grass. They kept trying to find primes; when that didn't work, they started trying to breed a Turing machine that would run it without immediately halting." Aineko lowers her paw daintily. "None of them tried treating it as a map of a connectionist system based on the only terrestrial components anyone had ever beamed out into deep space. Except me. But then, your mother had a hand in my wetware, too."

ericsoderstrom• 3 years ago

wait what. I just read neuromancer and don't see how that applies? Were rio/wintermute ever involved in detecting an alien signal?

alephxyz• 3 years ago

(spoilers) In the final chapter, the merged AI tells Case it found transmissions from "others" in the Centauri system.

zh32• 3 years ago

The AI identified 20,515 signals of interest, which the researchers had to inspect manually. Of those, eight had the characteristics of technosignatures and couldn’t be attributed to radio interference.

The obvious question being, if the AI is so smart why was it necessary to use humans to check 20,515 signals to find the eight with the "characteristics of technosignatures"?

junon2• 3 years ago

Presumably, because it filtered through orders of magnitude more than that.

m3kw92• 3 years ago

Because it’s not so smart, it just try to recognize a set of patterns that was trained to look at

detrites• 3 years ago

Which is what we do. The rest of what we believe makes us special is simply emergent, and arbitrarily defined in terms of just being further useful pattern recognition, rather than any fundamental property of "intelligence".

readyplayeremma3• 3 years ago

AI is not a well-defined term. This is more likely a specific machine learning technique that is designed to identify all the boring "normal stuff" and ignore it, and then do that at very large scale. By doing that, you can find the interesting parts so that humans with more limited resources can determine if those newly flagged things need to be added to the boring list, or if they do represent something truly interesting.

edit: After reading the article a bit more, it is using a random forest classifier. This is almost certainly not meeting the definition of what many here are thinking when the term "AI" is being used in the title. The term is clearly used here for marketing purposes.

haupt• 3 years ago

The term is clearly used here for marketing purposes.

I think most uses are for sensationalistic purposes. I'd wager almost nobody in the general public really understands what AI is or can pin it down. It doesn't help when so many different media outlets abuse the terminology by using it to refer to different things. What's even worse is that whatever ideas people have about AI tend to come from Hollywood.

nyrikki8• 3 years ago

They are talking about ML, which is statistical pattern matching and finding.

Gödel ruined the fun of automated theorem testing a century ago unless we make significant discoveries in math.

Type inference is an accessable example of SOTA automated reasoning if you want a more realistic idea of what our current constraints are.

We will be restricted to Human assisted Turing machines for the foreseeable future unless there is a major development in pure math.

Remember we can't even build a logically consistent model of arithmetic due to Gödel.

nl7• 3 years ago

If you read the paper itself[1] the random forest is only used in the final stage. The main approach is a convolutional variational autoencoder (which of course is a deep learning model).

The VAE model itself is defined in step 6 in [2]

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-022-01872-z.epdf?shar...

[2] https://github.com/PetchMa/ML_GBT_SETI/blob/4096_pipeline/te...

buddhistan• 3 years ago

No one claimed the AI "is so smart" - it's another tool in their kit. The article clearly conveys that the potential is a useful way to augment human-led research by providing a way of quickly processing large datasets i.e. the 20k signals are filtering down 150 terabytes of data which is much more manageable for human analysis. It's not like we have definitive parameters of what constitutes an "alien signal," so we can't exactly create an absolute model for detecting such telemetry. Instead the goal of the article is to simply demonstrate exciting new ways to leverage machine learning methods in different contexts

HdS84• 3 years ago

Trying to filter noise from data also follows the 80,/20 principle. The rules for the easy cases is written easily but then you have one-offs, maybes and special cases. Trying to filter one of these does not cover anything else. So doing it manually takes the same time.

Case study: had to clean a list of German addresses once. Excluding obviously invalid addresses like some Chinese address was easy. But some addresses had errors which needed a human eye to fix and correct.

remarkEon• 3 years ago

I'm assuming that the 20,515 signals of interest come from a pool that's one or several orders of magnitude larger than 20,515.

zh32• 3 years ago

I understand. Still, the point remains that the AI is, in this case, clearly inferior to humans (I would have been impressed if the humans found 20,515 signatures and the AI only - verifably - found eight of them to be worth following up).

jacobsenscott2• 3 years ago

Because it isn't AI. It is just statistical models. AI is for marketing.

tshaddox2• 3 years ago

How do you judge whether 20,515 is a large number or a small number? If the AI provided 2 candidates is that still too high?

flangola7• 3 years ago

SETI@home sorted through I think trillions of data points.

ad404b8a372f2b9• 3 years ago

Any 10000s of something is a large number when it involves human work.

mr_toad4• 3 years ago

How do you judge whether 20,515 is a large number or a small number?

It’s a trade-off between false positives and false negatives, and the budget you have to investigate alerts.

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

naasking• 3 years ago

Because the statistical models powering AI don't have the depth of understanding of a PhD in this field, and so it casts a wide net to ensure nothing gets missed and then a more refined search by human heuristics is needed.

nl7• 3 years ago

The others were "intelligent" signals but from human interference. There's a lot of this so the unique patterns don't occur often enough to automate.

The paper is actually worth reading about this part[1]. They have a moderately complex pipeline that you can think of as a filter: it tries to find anomalous signals.

The stage-1 autoregressor filtered 115M signals to 3M. Then they perform signal processing techniques to remove things like GPS signal contamination ("t can be seen that certain observing frequencies contain a much higher number of events compared with the others—for example, the region around 1,600 MHz. This overlaps with known RFI at the GBT site specifically from persistent GPS signals.").

After this second stage they are left with 20,515 potential signals which were visually inspected.

The issue here is that we don't know what a alien signal looks like so we can't just use a classifier. The pipeline can only find things it has never seen before, but it takes human judgement to decide if these signals are "alien" or more likely contamination from human sources that weren't filtered ("Regarding the nature of the rest of the events, most of them look like false positives associated with RFI signals.")

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-022-01872-z.epdf?shar...

nanidin• 3 years ago

I think it's useful to replace "AI" with "app" any time you encounter it in the wild. AI is a set of computational techniques that is very broad. The problem with considering "the AI" or "an AI" is that people have in mind some kind of AI agent and that isn't really the case.

AI is also not well defined - day one of my AI course in university opened with "What is AI?" Generally once we figure out how to do something using a computer, we decide that's not really intelligent anymore so the implementation isn't AI. An example of that is the minimax algorithm - it's featured "AI: A Modern Approach"[0] but it isn't really something people think of when they hear "an AI".

[0] https://aima.cs.berkeley.edu/contents.html

ETH_start• 3 years ago

The AI is fast, not smart.

consumer451• 3 years ago

Here is a timely interview with Dr. Cherry Ng and Peter Ma (co-authors of the paper from TFA) on this very topic.

Released only 10 minutes ago. I am only part way through but lots of great details here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dIfaDuDejs

af3d• 3 years ago

"Guys - we've found intelligent alien life! We have even decoded their signals."

"Amazing, let's send them a response!"

"Ah yes, about that..."

"What is it? Go on..."

"We're talking 250,000 light-years away. Their civilization is probably extinct by now."

moans

astkaasa• 3 years ago

DO NOT ANSWER! DO NOT ANSWER! DO NOT ANSWER!

mromanuk• 3 years ago

"Given that the main goal of this work is to apply an ML technique to identify signals with a specific pattern, we do not attempt to make a definite conclusion of whether these eight signals are genuinely produced by ET. We encourage further re-observations of these targets." [0]

Don't hold your breath waiting for aliens just yet.

0: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-022-01872-z.epdf

nyrikki8• 3 years ago

While I would be happy if these were from extra terrestrial beings,IMHO they most likely will be something like further examples of Strange non-chotic dynamic systems like RRc Lyrae star KIC 5520878 which is also exciting

mc32• 3 years ago

Obviously they can't train this model on known alien signals so it seems this would mainly speed up sifting through signals that are out of the ordinary (known patterns).

jojonogo• 3 years ago

Considering that Google Bard spectacularly failed at basic history of the solar system even a child would know to be false, it is laughable that so-called AI could identify alien signals.

BEEdwards• 3 years ago

You think a child would know off the top of their head that the first picture of an exoplanet wasn't taken by the new shiny telescope in the news and not the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in 2004?

That it's wrong about this isn't a problem because it's a basic fact everyone knows, but because it gets thing that people don't know wrong in a confident way.

People will assume this answer is as good as looking it up themselves and never check it.

nl7• 3 years ago

Code for the full pipeline including the autoencoder (and weights used) is available: https://github.com/PetchMa/ML_GBT_SETI

insane_dreamer4• 3 years ago

outperforms traditional methods in the search for alien signals

since we have no ground truth nor have we (to our knowledge) received any alien signals to date, I don't see how you can determine performance in terms of accuracy; so maybe they mean an increase in processing speed

FinalBriefing• 3 years ago

Well, they can train the model on things we know _aren't_ alien signals.

Edit: From the article:

  > To train the AI system, Ma inserted simulated signals into actual data, allowing the autoencoder to learn what to look for. Then the researchers fed the AI more than 150 terabytes of data from 480 observing hours at the Green Bank Telescope.

The simulated signals were sounds that couldn't possibly be produced by any (known) natural astrophysical process. So, the model finds signals that have characteristics of artificially generated signals.

mr_toad4• 3 years ago

Or it will identify novel astrophysical phenomena. Which is not a bad thing.

insane_dreamer4• 3 years ago

yes, it can identify _unknown_ signals, but can't determine whether they are _alien_ or simply indeterminate natural phenomena

bhawks• 3 years ago

What is the likelihood that intelligent life develops encryption before radio communication and therefore any signals they send appear to be random noise?

The Romans used encryption for military purposes and there is no hard precondition on developing broadcast communications before understanding the math behind cryptography. How improbable is it to imagine a society with deep end to end encryption communication?

TheOtherHobbes• 3 years ago

How improbable is it to imagine a society that doesn't need encryption?

Clearly not happening on Earth, but hardly impossible elsewhere.

mr_toad4• 3 years ago

What is the likelihood that intelligent life develops encryption before radio communication

We developed encryption before radio. It just wasn’t very good encryption by today’s standards. The problem is that your best encryption might be trivial to crack by a civilisation that’s thousands of years older than yours.

AI Joins Hunt for ET: Study Finds 8 Potential Alien Signals

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