Stephen Wolfram

Well, depends what you mean.

If there's a representation that they have, if it converts to some representation where we can say, oh yes, that's a representation that we can recognize represents understanding, then all well and good.

But actually, the only ones that I think we can say would represent understanding are ones that will then do things that we humans kind of recognize as being useful to us.

quantify how technologically advanced this particular civilization is so are they a threat to us from a military perspective yeah that's probably the kind of first kind of understanding they'll be interested in gosh that's so hard i mean that's like in the arrival movie that was sort of one of the key questions is is you know why are you here so to speak and it's are you gonna hurt us

Right.

But even that is, you know, it's a very unclear, you know, it's like the, are you going to hurt us?

That comes back to a lot of interesting AI ethics questions because the, you know, we might make an AI that says, well, take autonomous cars, for instance, you know, are you going to hurt us?

Well, let's make sure you only drive at precisely the speed limit because we want to make sure we don't hurt you, so to speak, because that's some, and then, well, something, you know, but you say, but actually that means I'm going to be really late for this thing.

And, you know, that sort of hurts me in some way.

So it's hard to know.

Even the definition of what it means to hurt someone is unclear.

And as we start thinking about things about AI ethics and so on, that's something one has to address.

There's always trade-offs, and that's the annoying thing about ethics.

Yeah, well, right.

And I mean, I think ethics, like these other things we're talking about, is a deeply human thing.

There's no abstract, you know, let's write down the theorem that proves that this is ethically correct.

That's a meaningless idea.

You know, you have to have a ground truth, so to speak, that's ultimately sort of what humans want.

And they don't all want the same thing.

So that gives one all kinds of additional complexity in thinking about that.