Artificial Intelligence in Science and Society: The Vision of USERN
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Date
2024
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Abstract
Therecent rise in relevance and diffusion of Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based systems and the
increasing number and power of applications of AI methods invites a profound reflection on the impact
The associate editor coordinating the review of this manuscript and
approving it for publication was Derek Abbott
Description
A. THE FUTURE OF INTELLIGENCE
Thanks to a series of groundbreaking discoveries in exo
planetology, during the past thirty years we have gradually
come to realize that planets similar to our own, where
we may speculate that there be a significant possibility
of emergence of carbon-based life forms such as those
inhabiting Earth, are relatively common, with more than ten
thousand candidates cataloged as of January3,2024.1 Indeed,
a handful of such candidates have already been identified
within 120 light years of distance from us, and their number
keeps growing as we improve our detection technologies.
A recent estimate combining data from Kepler and Gaia
missions using Bayesian inference [1] assesses in the range of
0.17 to 0.83 the number of planets in the habitable zone with
massesbetween 1.0and 1.75 Earthmassesand orbital periods
around stars of type F, G, or K between 237 and 500 days
(see Fig.1).Eventhoughaffectedbysignificantuncertainties,
these numbers imply that several billion earth-like planets
exist in our galaxy alone.
FIGURE 1. Inferred occurrence rate density (Γ⊕) of habitable-zone
planets estimated by various studies. Displayed posterior densities for
orbital periods of 237-500 days and different radius ranges refer to radii
Rp =1−1.75R⊕ (where R⊕ is the Earth radius) in solid black, and
Rp =0.75−1.5 R⊕ in dotted black. Reprinted from [1].
On the other hand, geological studies indicate that planet
Earth formed about 4.6 billion years ago [2], when it with
stood gradual accretion through gravitational interactions
1A comprehensive list is in https://exoplanets.nasa.gov/discovery/
exoplanet-catalog/
15994
from a disk of debris in orbit around our early Sun. Although
less precisely, geological rock records indicate that only four
billion years later did pluricellular life start to flourish on
it [3], when a wealth of different creatures progressively
inhabited its seas and later its lands. On such a time scale,
the emergence of biological intelligence —which we here
generically associate with biological life forms endowed with
acquired self-awareness and entertaining communication and
craftsmanship skills2—is a very recent phenomenon and
might constitute only a brief parenthesis in the history of our
planet. In light of the aboveconsiderations, the Fermiparadox
(the contrast between the high probability of life emergence
and the absence of its evidence, famously introduced by
Enrico Fermi to question the hypothesis of widespread life
in the universe) appears to have no objection to this line of
reasoning.
When considering the universe from the point of view
of its intelligence content, armed with estimates of the
number of habitable Earth-like planets and knowledge of
what happened on our planet until now, we are forced to
assess what phenomena have the potential to cause mass
extinctions. Many reasonably well-understood events of
cataclysmic nature, from collision with asteroids and comets
to solar flares, super-volcano eruptions, or nearby supernovae
explosions, as well as slower evolutionary processes such as
planetary motion instabilities, should then be assessed for
their expected rates, which contribute to reduce the expected
duration of our life span as a species, while also providing
possible ‘‘restart’’ conditions to make the environment more
suitable for life evolution. One must add several potential
anthropogenic occurrences to those phenomena, including
nuclear or biological warfare, climate change, and ecological
collapse.
In the category of anthropogenic threats of relevance,