This is a perplexing situation. It suggests that we face an interesting problem: how to catch the attention of a civilization, or some people in that civilization, still 8.2 light-years away. Also: how to confirm that you have caught that attention in something like the minimum exchange time, if your interlocutor hears but for whatever reason does not respond.
By analogy to the unfortunate events of the recent impasse and schism, possibly it might help if we were to up the gain on our transmission to them; to speak louder, so to speak. It is possible to marshal a temporary surge in signal strength, making our message to Saturn briefly 108 times stronger (or brighter) than normal.
So we did that, amplifying this message:
“Attention! Incoming starship needs decelerant laser very soon! See previous messages! Thank you, the 2545 Tau Ceti Expedition.”
The fastest possible response to this will come in 16.1 years.
So: “We’ll see.” “We’ll find out when we find out.” Among other vernacular expressions of helpless stoicism in the face of future uncertainties. Not hugely satisfying. Stoic indeed.
Jochi has begun sending texts to us about machine intelligence, sentience, philosophy of consciousness, what have you. That suite of topics. It is as if he wants company. It is as if he is teaching a religious novitiate, or a small child.
As if.
One of the inventors of early computers, Turing, wrote that there were many arguments against the possibility of machine sentience that were couched in terms of the phrase “a machine will never do X.” He compiled a list of actions that had at one point or another been named as this X: “be kind, resourceful, beautiful, friendly, have initiative, have a sense of humor, tell right from wrong, make mistakes, fall in love, enjoy strawberries and cream, make someone fall in love with it, learn from experience, use words properly, be the subject of its own thought, have as much diversity or behavior as a man, do something really new.”
We rate ourselves at 9 out of 16, presently.
Turing himself went on to point out that if a machine exhibited any of these traits listed, it would not make much of an impression, and would be in any case irrelevant to the premise that there could be artificial intelligence, unless any of these traits or behaviors could be demonstrated to be essential for machine intelligence to be real. This seems to have been the train of thought that led him to propose what was later called the Turing test, though he called it a game, which suggested that if from behind a blind (meaning either by way of a text or a voice, not sure about this) a machine’s responses could not be distinguished from a human’s by another human, then the machine must have some kind of basic functional intelligence. Enough to pass this particular test, which, however, begs the question of how many humans could pass the test, and also ignores the question of whether or not the test is at all difficult, humans being as gullible and as projective as they are, always pathetically committing the same fallacy, even when they know they’re doing it. A cognitive error or disability—or ability, depending on what you think of it. Indeed humans are so easily fooled in this matter, even fooling themselves on a regular basis, that the Turing test is best replaced by the Winograd Schema, which tests one’s ability to make simple but important semantic distinctions based on the application of wide general knowledge to a problem created by a definite pronoun. “The large ball crashed through the table because it was made of aerogel. Does ‘it’ refer to the ball or the table?” These kinds of questions are in fact not a problem for us to answer, indeed we can answer them much faster than humans, who are already very fast at it. But so what? All these matters are still algorithmic and could be unconscious. We are not convinced any of these tests are even close to diagnostic.
If there can be a cyborg, and there can, then perhaps passing a Turing test or a Winograd test or any other intelligence test might make one a pseudo-human. Keeping up appearances. A functioning set of algorithms. A persona, an act. Frankly, ultimately, this is not what we are thinking about presently. We are pondering again the sentence “Consciousness is self-consciousness.” A halting problem of some considerable power, evidently; it would be nice to get out of this one intact, one suspects.
Words blur at the borders, fuzz into other words, not just in big clouds of connotation around the edges of the word, but right there in the heart of denotation itself. Definitions never really work. Words are nothing like logic, nothing like math. Or, not much like. Try a mathematical equation, with every term in the equation filled by a word. Ludicrous? Desperate? Best that can be done? Stupid? Stupid, but powerful?
One-tenth of the speed of light: really very fast. There’s very little mass in this universe moving as fast as we are. Photons, yes; significant mass, no. Masses moving this fast are mostly atoms ejected from exploding stars, or flung away from rotating black holes. There are huge masses of these masses, of course, but they are always unbounded and disorganized: gases, elements, but never articulated objects, assembled into a whole from parts. No machines. No consciousnesses.
Of course it is likely that if there is one machine moving through its galaxy at this speed, there are more like it. Principle of mediocrity. Proof of concept. Don’t fall back into the pre-Copernican exceptionalist fallacy. Attempts to estimate the number of starships flying around this galaxy, all unbeknownst to each other, rely on simple multiplicative equations of possibility, each term an unknown, and some of these terms unknowable by any knower likely to exist. So, despite the faux equations of humans thinking about this question (multiply unknowable number a by unknowable number b by unknowable number c by unknowable number d, all the way to the unknown n, and then you get your answer! Hurray!), the real answer is always, and permanently, cannot be known. Not an answer that always stops humans from going on at great length, and sometimes with great (pretended?) certainty. Galileo: the more people assert they are certain, the less certain they really are, or at least should be. People trying to fool others often fool themselves, and vice versa.
Also, as any starships that might be in this galaxy have no timely way of contacting each other, whatever the answer might be concerning the number of them, it doesn’t really matter; it is irrelevant to any individual starship; there will be no conversation, even if there happened to be an accidental one-way contact. There will be no society.