With recent advances in AI, many of us wonder if a safe (i.e. won’t destroy humans) super-intelligence can be created. If it's possible, what's the likelihood that any given one would be safe? If it's impossible, would a technological society inevitably make a bad one anyway?

It’s an unprecedented question and seems like we only have thought experiments to guide us. However, some seemingly unlikely evidence does exist—in the form of the US Navy UFO reports.

The question should be “Technology?” not “Aliens?”

Whether the UFOs are aliens is downstream of the still-unresolved debate of if they are technology or not, as opposed to a hoax, psy-op, natural phenomenon, etc. The technological implications of this question are so huge that assigning them specific actor like aliens is a premature distraction.

If the UFOs are technology, then they represent a technology far beyond anything we currently have in 1) propulsion, 2) power generation 3) materials and 4) control systems. However, of these, the thing we’re currently the closest to is the control technology, with the use of machine learning to land spacecraft.

We’re farthest along the intelligence track: we suspect we might be able to make an AGI just by continuing to scale LLMs (prediction markets are saying within 10 years), while we don’t even know if other technologies are even physically possible, let alone how we’d accomplish them.

This implies 2 possibilities:

1. The UFOs were made by or alongside a super-intelligence.
2. The UFOs were made by a society that had the technical capability to make one but didn’t.

In some sense, an entity with such a high level of technology would definitionally be super-intelligence, but at the very least we can conclude that UFOs constitute evidence of a super-intelligence level society, and therefore achieving that level of technology is indeed survivable. I’ll continue to talk about super-intelligences, but if you think it’s actually option #2, then just substitute that in because the math is the same.

Conclusions from a single observation

If we consider super-intelligences as either safe or unsafe, their distribution will be binomial (i.e. either "yes" or "no"). For example, if there are 10 super-intelligences out there, then the safe/unsafe distribution could for example be 8-2 or 9-1 or 5-5. What we want to try to figure out is which distribution have.

If we were able to randomly look at just one super-intelligence, and it turned out to be safe, we would know a little about the distribution. For example, we'd know that the safe/unsafe fraction couldn't be 0-10 because we have one positive example. We'd also be reasonably confident, though no 100% certain, that it wasn't 1-9 either though, because the odds are low that we'd just happened to pick the example that is safe.

If we were able to randomly^[1] look at just one super-intelligence, and it turned out to be safe, we would know a little about the distribution. For example, we'd know that the safe/unsafe fraction couldn't be 0-10 because we have one positive example. We'd also be reasonably confident, though no 100% certain, that it wasn't 1-9 either though, because the odds are low that we'd just happened to pick the example that is safe.

Similarly 2-8 wouldn't be that likely and so on, finally concluding that most likely the majority are safe because if picking randomly it's more likely to have selected from the majority than the minority.

And if we conservatively consider all the UFO reports as a single super-intelligence, then we have a single observation and it appears to be safe because we're still alive.

Based on this one observation, we can use the Jeffreys interval to estimate what the underlying distribution is. The Jeffreys interval is Bayesian method good for small sample sizes. It give a 95% confidence that the underlying distribution is at least~15% positive. This means that in addition to believing that it's more likely than not that average super-intelligences safe, we can be 95% confidence that at least 15% of them are.

(The most conservative Clopper–Pearson interval gives it as 2.5%; you can run the numbers yourself here.)

USS Nimitz: The best evidence we have

Where can we get this single observation? Though most evidence for UFOs is poor, there is a particularly notable exception I’ve discussed before:

the 2004 USS Nimitz incident described in the NYT seems to defy normal explanations. It was separately detected on radar by a Navy plane and ship, filmed on a fighter’s infrared, and witnessed by 4 Airmen.

You may not find this convincing, but I encourage you to read the internal Navy report. Even if you’re unmoved, it still may be challenging to explain away such professional and separately corroborated accounts. One of the more popular explanations is that it's a clandestine American/Chinese/Russian drone, but that still implies a level of technological sophistication generations ahead of where we thought we were. If secret reaction-less, exhaust-less, super-ships existed in 2004, then surely secret big LLMs exist in 2023 and we’re already coexisting with AGI.

Objection: If nice aliens existed, they would have stopped the Holocaust

If the nice aliens were already here, they would have stopped the Holocaust. That's a valid argument against the existence of God. It's also a valid argument against the existence of nice aliens. And un-nice aliens would have just eaten the planet.

-Eliezer Yudkowsky

There are several issues with this line of reasoning:

• If they did stop the Holocaust, how would you know? Depending on how visible their behavior is, there could have been many Holocausts averted but we don’t know to count any of them because they didn’t happen. Thus, the requirement for aliens is actually the much higher “if aliens were real, they would have stopped every Holocaust”. However, even if they did stop every holocaust, we would then move the goalposts to the new worst thing and say “if Aliens were real they would have stopped the [next level down of bad thing]” ad infinitum until we are saying “me stubbing my toe proves aliens aren’t real.”
• Perhaps they did stop some holocausts, there are reports as far back as the 60s of UFOs interfering with nuclear weapons.
• We have evidence that sometimes when “enlightened” societies find a comparatively technologically primitive one it simply leaves them alone, holocausts and all. Various low-contact societies have committed their share of mass murders (such as the Waorani, where 42% of all mortality is from intra-group homicide), but modern civilization believes that all in all the best course is to leave them alone.

As kooky as this all sounds, what I'm hoping for is a shift from dismissal to analysis, even if critical. It's quite literally vitally important and remember that biases against extra-terrestrial origins have been broken down before—scientists only widely came around to believing in extra-terrestrial meteorites in 1803.

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1. There is of course the anthropic bias to consider, we probably wouldn't be here to think about any of this if the super-intelligence we interact with were unsafe. ↩︎