Understanding AIs and Understanding Aliens - The Context S04E03

Our desire to understand is boundless. We reach out with our robots in the solar system and with astronomical instruments all across the universe in the hopes of recording communications from alien civilizations. We operate under the assumption that we will be able to understand them, which could be wrong.

But we can prepare for this complex and important task, using artificial intelligence as a training partner. As a matter of fact, the Explainable AI project from the European Union achieves exactly this. The goal of the Explainable AI project is the ability to understand how an AI reasons and makes decisions in a manner that is intelligible to a human being, expressed in human language, in a manner that makes the reasoning transparent.

If we do not succeed in effectively establishing a positive and reliable communication with artificial intelligences, how can we pretend to be able to talk to alien civilizations?

PS: This is true not only for AIs, but also for whales or dolphins that have a complex language, which we must attempt to fully decode. Once we do that, communicating with them is going to be the equivalent of communicating with aliens.