By Mira Sundar, Staff Writer
Humanity has spent decades listening to the stars for signals, assuming our invaders would come from above, and its downfall will be the result of a completely external threat. Historically, humans have assumed that artificial intelligence would reside in a human-like robot built to mimic our form, imagining the danger strictly as a physical replacement of humans and their labor. In reality, there were never many similarities between AI and humans, other than their shared intelligence abilities and data-processing capacities. Some expect that once AI reaches human-level capacity, it will enter a loop of self-improvement and engineering improved versions of itself, resulting in an “intelligence explosion,” where ultimately, human intelligence is left behind. Because advanced AI represents a completely non-human intelligence and lacks biological empathy, or the human valuation for life and fear of death, fears of AI takeover stem from these machines developing a foreign and unpredictable logic that doesn’t align with human values and could be threatening to humans.
Scientists have frequently noted the implausibility of an alien attack on earth, citing the astronomical costs in time, fuel, and cosmic resources, but this new alien, AI, is birthed locally on earth, and sustains itself on human and earthly resources, electricity and infrastructure. The growing reach of artificial intelligence resembles the alien invasion so many feared.
The first novel to popularize the ‘alien invasion’ trope was H.G. Wells’ foundational 1898 sci-fi novel The War of the Worlds, which chronicled a sudden, devastating invasion of late-Victorian England by Martians. Metallic cylindrical shooting stars land on the English countryside, and from these emerge grotesque tentacled Martians with highly evolved biological brains yet extreme lack of human emotion. After their attack, the British Empire, the world’s reigning superpower, collapses in days, as its citizens turn to refugees.
The early ideas of the dangerous ‘alien’ can be described as the creature depicted in the novel: a body stripped entirely of unnecessary biological mass, with seemingly deficient facial features, for the purpose of consuming environmental data rather than communicating or expressing emotion. This early alien can be physically compared to early robot versions, such as George Devol’s Unimate (1961), the first industrial robot arm, and a part of the cultural evolution leading toward AI and modern automation devices.
The Martians of The War of the Worlds begin cultivating the invasive “Red Weed” plant that chokes out Earth’s native ecology; their invasion depended on crushing human terrain instead of fully launching a decimating foreign threat. Similarly to the invasion, generative AI floods the natural internet with synthetic data, deepfakes images, and repeated and misleading content, and this digital Red Weed chokes out authentic human culture, art, and journalism.
Next, the Martians viewed humans merely as cattle, draining human blood for sustenance, not worrying of humans’ total extinction. Humans were seen as lower to the aliens, and were made use of as a convenient fuel source to keep alien systems running. AI similarly devalues human life, favoring mathematical benefit over human harm, and in functioning, it extracts from human art to benefit itself and expand its capabilities.
Although the vast majority of the world’s most powerful AI systems have no physical presence, media and popular culture often merges AI and the humanoid robot into a single concept (like the Terminator or science fiction androids), and the AI acts as the brain and the robot as the body. The modern depiction of AI mirrors the modern depiction of the aliens. Both appear as humans but are so fundamentally different from humans that they pose threat to humans.
In The War of the Worlds, humanity was ultimately saved from extinction by the bacteria of earth, but the digital alien we have birthed is immune to all of earth’s biology. As we watch our culture, art, and uniquely human touch get rapidly overshadowed by generated content and stolen by AI, the modern alien invasion becomes apparent.
Sources
https://bigthink.com/the-future/general-ai-artificial-intelligence
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_invasion
https://www.britannica.com/topic/The-War-of-the-Worlds-novel-by-Wells
https://aliens.fandom.com/wiki/Alien_(Spielberg%27s_War_of_the_Worlds)
https://www.transformernews.ai/p/the-fuse-is-lit-on-the-intelligence-ai-recursive-self-improvement
https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2014/10/22/the-cost-of-interstellar-flight/
https://futureoflife.org/ai/are-we-close-to-an-intelligence-explosion/
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