Artificial Them
Are aliens alive or an echo of a past civilization?

A year ago, I wrote about the moment I caught myself letting AI do my thinking for me.¹ Where does the "I" end and the artificial begin, and what does the slow outsourcing and loss of friction mean for authorship?

My view on AI has gone from skepticism to finding its place in my day-to-day. I've seen the industry swing from the promise of a god-like AI that will replace every job done on a computer to settling on agentic assistants that, if you just let them, will do tasks for you autonomously from a Mac Mini you have sitting around and help justify all the investment and water wasted in the process.

I can't deny my new dependence on AI, as an augmentation, not a replacement. I see it everywhere: in every pull request I review and in clients' codebases at work; suddenly, every commit has an elaborate message. However critical you are, you're more comfortable using AI for your tasks than you were a couple of years ago. And however much we make fun of the sporadic signature slop it generates, there is no denying that AI is rapidly evolving and finding a permanent place in our humanity.

We already trust AI with our lives on the road. Waymo is running half a million fully autonomous rides a week across ten cities in the US. A few years ago, that was a thought experiment. Now it's someone's Tuesday commute in Austin. In space, ninety percent of the driving Perseverance does on Mars is autonomous.² The DART mission in 2022 steered itself into an asteroid, with no human hand on the wheel for the final approach. ESA's Hera spacecraft navigates its own path through deep space.

Right now, if someone 2,000 light-years away pointed a telescope at Earth, they'd be watching the Roman Empire. Space isn't just vast. It's deep in time.

An AI probe wouldn't age, wouldn't need oxygen, wouldn't care about radiation. It could cross distances that would kill every human who ever lived and still be working when it arrived. At the speeds we're currently engineering toward, it would take thousands of years to reach even nearby star systems. By the time it got there, the civilization that sent it might be unrecognizable. It may not exist. The probe would arrive bearing intelligence about something that had already vanished.

If something intelligent is out there, and it sent its own version of that probe a long time ago, pointed in our direction, what do you think it sent? An artifact. A form of intelligence modeled by creatures that may have gone extinct before our sun was born. A superior life form? Well, that's relative.