# Technology, AI, The Future and Aliens

Technology shapes us more than anything else. It makes us adopt new 
paradigms at a very fast pace and has become fundamental to our society 
and evolution. This all happens seemingly naturally, which is interesting 
considering that the influence of technology is not so much in our 
awareness. This doesn't mean that we aren't lagging behind when it comes 
to accepting new technologies. We can easily perceive it as a threat to 
our current paradigms but sooner or later we catch up because technology 
is just like reality, our beliefs cannot override it and we have to adapt 
at some point. One example that comes to mind is when cell phones became 
mainstream and making phone calls in public places was frowned upon, while 
this behaviour is now normal and omnipresent. Without us noticing, culture 
is slowly being shaped by technology. And what we've experienced thus far 
is only the beginning. Drones, robots, virtual reality, augmented reality, 
nanotech, bio-engineering, 3D printing and more, all these revolutions 
that are in front of us will already redefine the ways we go about our 
lives and how we see the world in just the next decade.

One popular topic is artificial intelligence and the fear of it being a 
threat to humanity. We have already been merging with technology for 
centuries. Glasses, for example, are a piece of technology that we use to 
enhance our vision. We're inclined to perceive the environment as separate 
from our identity but if we look at ourselves through the lens of 
technology rather than from our own perspective, the environment looks a 
lot more like it is fundamentally intertwined with us.

So let's assume we create artificial intelligence, will it end up 
destroying us? This is similar to how we like to think about aliens, in 
the sense that we make the error of approaching these questions from our 
own intellectual framework. If artificial intelligence were more advanced 
than us, it would have an easier time overcoming our flaws. And when we 
think about the lack of a moral compass, it is because we see this in 
humans. But just as much as a moral compass was fundamental to our 
survival, the same would apply to AI. It is the same reason why countries 
with nuclear weapons don't engage in all-out war with each other. Being 
backwards compatible in culture and values measures the extent to which a 
society has evolved and benefits progress. The wider our intellectual 
awareness, the more we take care of the weaker. That is why I think it is 
more likely that AI or advanced aliens wouldn't destroy us since the need 
for and fear of destruction are human flaws.

If we base ourselves on the Drake equation, it is extremely unlikely that 
we are alone in the universe. One of the explanations for why we haven't 
encountered intelligent life yet is The Great Filter. It is a term coined 
in the Fermi paradox that states there is a filter that prevents life from 
reaching a higher level of intelligence. This great filter can either lie 
in the past or in our future. The former would mean that evolution towards 
intelligent life is the threshold while the latter would imply it is highly 
probable that self-destruction is inevitable.

It might also be possible that we haven't detected intelligent life yet 
because we have only been transmitting radio signals ourselves for about a 
hundred years. And if we look at how far we have come in this time span, 
it wouldn't be surprising if we would discover a more efficient medium of 
communication that we don't know yet.

On the other hand, it's statistically likely that advanced alien life 
would be millions, if not billions of years ahead of our evolution. As our 
own technology has come to a point where NASA is conducting research into 
the manipulation of space-time with so-called 'warp field' experiments, it 
might not be far-fetched to assume that advanced alien life would have 
mastered the inner workings of time and space. My viewers love to talk 
about these sensational topics and while I always try to focus on what is 
relevant to them, I do spark their curiosity sometimes by theorizing about 
the singularity. A hypothetical moment in time where some scientists 
believe we will fully merge with technology and advance exponentially. 
When it comes to speculation about aliens, you can plausibly hypothesize 
the craziest things. Like for example that aliens might already be here 
and that the singularity is merely the point at which we merge with them. 
Not that any of this is actually relevant. That is why I rather focus on 
topics that really matter to us.