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Forget UFOs, the Aliens Are Here: AI and the End of Humans

Faced with a home-grown superintelligence, will we respond the way studies say we would if we met ETs?

Patrick Metzger
5 min readFeb 15, 2023
“Can a robot write a symphony? Can a robot take a blank canvas and turn it into a masterpiece?” “Yep.” Screenshot from I, Robot, 20th Century Fox

How would humans respond to encountering an alien life form with intelligence vastly superior to our own? We’re about to find out.

In 2011, a NASA-sponsored study on the implications of extraterrestrial contact speculated that:

Even if the ETI are friendly toward us and give us the choice to accept or reject their knowledge, the vast differences between our respective societies may force the more primitive one (ours) into a demoralizing state of societal collapse.

A Brookings Institute report in 1960 arrived at a similar conclusion, observing that many societies who were “sure of their place in the universe” simply “disintegrated” when faced with more technologically advanced cultures.

The recent spike in UFO/UAP interest notwithstanding, there’s no evidence that extraterrestrials are on the way. But there is an imminent threat from a superior intelligence, and we’ve created it.

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Patrick Metzger
Patrick Metzger

Written by Patrick Metzger

Dilettante, smartass, apocalypticist. ***See “Lists” for stories by genre.***

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