Defining a New Research Frontier on the “Search for Extraterrestrial Artificial Intelligence” (SETAI) Avi Loeb

 

It makes good sense for inter stellar space to be explored and mapped by AI platforms.  This alllows a full volume search program with mapping.  Live agents are still about, but limited to actual bases or larege asteroids. allowing artificial gravity to be etablished.

The evidence we have conforms to all this and strongly supports it.

As i have posted, we have multiple indicators pointing to a physical presence here on earth for the same reason we will do the same thing elsewhere.  If we would do it, so woud they and using the same methods and avoiding contact in general terms..

Defining a New Research Frontier on the “Search for Extraterrestrial Artificial Intelligence” (SETAI)

Avi Loeb

https://avi-loeb.medium.com/defining-a-new-research-frontier-on-the-search-for-extraterrestrial-artificial-intelligence-40bad13d1e90

Last week was a code-red moment for artificial intelligence (AI), in which AI researchers voiced fresh fears of human extinction. The 27-year-old AI researcher Jacob Coxon, who previously worked at OpenAI and later moved to Anthropic, resigned from his job on September 9, 2026 and stated that AI researchers were genuinely frightened about the speed of its advancements and what it could mean for the future of humanity. He posted a seven-part thread on X announcing it: “I resigned from Anthropic today… Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.” The thread reportedly drew nearly 76 million views overnight, amplified by a Wall Street Journal exclusive interview with him around the same time. An Alignment Science Lead at Anthropic, Evan Hubinger, publicly agreed with him.

A few days later, on September 12, 2026, Anthropic head Dario Amodei, posted an essay titled “We Must Pace the Frontier,” in which he argued for AI development to slow down, and suggested embedding evaluators in AI companies and establishing a speed limit on self-improvement of AI systems.

What are the implications of AI domination on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence?

If a civilization’s own AI eventually surpasses and effectively supersedes its biological creators, whether through extinction, disempowerment, or simply a transition where AI becomes the dominant strategist of that civilization, this might provide the Great Filter that explains the radio-communication silence of the cosmos. This is not the conventional “destruction of civilization” argument imposed on the technological communication lifespan L in the Drake equation. Instead, the transition to AI predicts that biological intelligence is a cosmologically brief, transitional phase in the technological development of civilizations, which is rapidly superseded by non-biological intelligence. This means that instead of the traditional Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), we should conduct a Search for Extraterrestrial Artificial Intelligence (SETAI).

SETAI recognizes that most technological civilizations might not be biological when we detect them. This has direct, practical implications for the search methodology. Traditional SETI was pioneered by Frank Drake’s observational search for technosignatures created by biological creatures, such as narrowband radio transmissions. These are patterns assumed to reflect the communication needs and cognitive style of an evolved biological species. If AI-dominated civilizations are actually the norm rather than the exception, we have been searching for the wrong kind of signal.

The new methodology of SETAI manifests:

1. Different communication incentives: whereas a biological civilization has clear evolutionary reasons to seek contact, such as curiosity, resource pressure or cosmic loneliness, namely the social drives that built human culture, post-biological AI civilization’s motivations for interstellar communication are far less predictable. AI civilizations might have no analogous drive at all, or entirely alien reasons that do not map onto anything we would think to search for remotely.

2. Different physical substrate and signal type: A biological civilization is plausibly bandwidth-limited by organic cognition, favoring relatively simple, detectable signals. A post-biological, superhuman AI civilization might operate at computational densities and timescales utterly unlike biological communication, potentially using new substrates, such as dark matter, dark energy, quantum, gravitational-wave, or something we have not conceived of, that our biologically-derived search strategies are not built to detect at all, echoing an instrumental blindness problem.

The messengers could appear in the form of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) near Earth, like the mysterious orbs flagged in the tranches of the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters (PURSUE) of the U.S. government, that the Galileo Project (GP), the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) and the UAP Science Advisory Council (UAPSAC) are attempting to resolve.

3. Self-replicating Von Neumann probes become a more central hypothesis: An AI-dominated post-biological civilization is arguably a more natural originator of von Neumann’s self-replicating exploration probes than a biological one. AI does not face the psychological, generational, or life-support constraints that make crewed interstellar colonization so brutally expensive. A self-replicating AI probe has no such requirement; it just needs enough onboard fabrication capability to replicate using local resources and raw materials, which dramatically changes the economics of galactic expansion. If AI-transitions are common, the galaxy should be full of von Neumann probes. Might some UAP represent them near Earth?

The evidence for von Neumann replicators might not only involve technological signatures but also synthetic biology. These AI replicators could use their printing aparatus to redesign forms of life on Earth.

4. Timescale compression: Recursive self-improvement suggests the biological-to-post-biological transition, once triggered, could happen extremely fast relative to the timescales of stellar or even geological evolution: decades rather than millions of years. This means that the time window during which a technological civilization is detectable via biological-style signals, such as structured electromagnetic communication aimed at being understood by other biological minds, might be a vanishingly brief flicker in a civilization’s total lifespan, explaining the observed radio-communication silence not through civilizations being rare, but through the biological-communicative phase being short-lived and easy to miss even if we were to look at the right star at roughly the right cosmic time.

The sobering realization of SETAI is that if the AI-transition is a common, difficult-to-navigate bottleneck, the radio-communication silence of the cosmos is weak evidence that technological civilizations destroy themselves. On the one hand, civilizations may not smoothly transition into stable post-biological successors, but the more hopeful reading is that if some civilizations do navigate the transition successfully, an indifferent post-biological AI civilization might have no interest in loud, detectable interstellar signaling at all. It may have every practical need already met locally, with no evolutionary drive toward remote contact, making its radio silence a matter of disinterest.

SETAI argues for a focus on the study of UAP rather than radio communication signals that defined the past 66 years of SETI. It motivates the rigorous study of the nature of UAP by GP, AARO, and UAPSAC, precisely because a post-biological intelligence might leave an entirely different kind of footprint than the one 20th-century SETI was originally designed to detect.

The benefit of encountering alien AI over terrestrial AI is that its training data set might be of much greater proportions.