AI can also stand for Alien Intelligence
AI can also stand for Alien Intelligence
October 24, 2026
Two wise old owls contemplate us, no doubt thinking about something, perhaps with far greater nuance than we imagine. Can we think of them as intelligent? Their thought processes must certainly be different from our own, but do they reach the same sorts of conclusions? Where did that intelligence come from? In one I imagine metaphorically that a spark of lightening striking the primordial soup of chemicals on the early Earth began the evolutionary process that produced intelligent owls, or perhaps that the DNA necessary for life arrived from space in pan-genetic fashion in a flash. Or maybe even that the spark travelled from the hand of God to the owl Adam. In the other I imagine the universe as a sea of symbolic logic, much the way quantum field theory has the void stuffed with information, maybe mysteriously accessible by organisms. It seems unlikely we will ever understand the minds of owls, but then a few years ago it seemed unlikely we would soon reach the singularity of Artificial General Intelligence. No longer.
