Stephen Wolfram

I mean, that's our first sort of example of alien intelligence.

And the question is, how well do we communicate with AI?

If you were to say, if you were in the middle of a neural net and you open it up and it's like, what are you thinking?

Can you discuss things with it?

It's not easy, but it's not absolutely impossible.

So I think by the time, but given the setup of your question, aliens visiting, I think the answer is yes, one will be able to find some form of communication, whatever communication means, communication requires notions of purpose and things like this.

It's a kind of philosophical quagmire.

But how would aliens visit?

By visit, there's kind of an implication.

And here we're using the imprecision of human language.

In a world of the future, if that's represented in computational language, we might be able to take the concept visit

and go look in the documentation, basically, and find out exactly what does that mean, what properties does it have, and so on.

But by visit, in ordinary human language, I'm kind of taking it to be there's something, a physical embodiment that shows up in a spacecraft, since we kind of know that that's necessary.

We're not imagining it's just photons showing up in a radio signal, photons in some very elaborate pattern.

We're imagining it's physical things made of atoms and so on that show up.

Can it be photons in a pattern?

Well, that's a good question.

I mean, whether there is the possibility, you know, what counts as intelligence?

Good question.

I mean, it's, you know, and I used to think there was sort of a, oh, there'll be, you know, it'll be clear what it means to find extraterrestrial intelligence, etc., etc., etc.