Robots, not Little Green Men: Why aliens are likely to be AI

The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) has been one of the most fascinating and challenging endeavors of human civilization. For decades, scientists have been scanning the skies for any signs of alien civilizations, hoping to find evidence of their existence and perhaps even communicate with them. However, despite the vastness of the universe and the billions of potentially habitable planets, we have not yet detected any clear signals from intelligent aliens. Why is that? One possible answer is that we are looking for the wrong kind of intelligence. Most of our SETI efforts are based on the assumption that alien…