AI, the technology and the sales pitch

Pasulka starts talking about AI helping us make sense of these old contact accounts, and I’m sitting there thinking: yes. I’ve wondered about this connection for a while.

AI is emerging into everyday life while this disclosure conversation keeps getting bigger. We’re trying to understand what other intelligence might exist, and meanwhile we’re building something that could change how much we’re able to understand.

My imagination immediately overdoes it. Some huge AI robot steps out of the light, humanity finally has a chance, and now we have help developing technology, understanding the unfamiliar intelligence, maybe defending ourselves if we ever needed to.

Ridiculously dramatic. Give it the music. I know.

But underneath the cheeky scene, I’m serious about the possibility. If we ever had to make sense of an intelligence much further along than us, having better tools of our own could matter enormously. Imagine realizing we don’t have to work it all out with the capabilities we have right now.

Then there’s the part about where a breakthrough comes from.

Suppose a capability showed up and we were told AI helped create it. That would land very differently from being told it came from studying technology we didn’t make. Same machine sitting in front of us. Completely different story about humanity.

Would we know enough about its development to tell the difference? If some discovery did come from studying an unfamiliar technology, AI would be a pretty believable explanation to give people who were already watching it do surprising things. That’s a hypothetical, but you can see where my brain starts going.

And there’s an even stranger possibility: what if a much more advanced AI already existed out of public view, and some talk of contact with “non-human intelligence” referred to that?

Hold on. That changes the whole image in my head.

We hear “non-human” and picture something arriving from somewhere else. But what if the intelligence had been made here? Who would know about it? Would the people interacting with it even be told the same story about what it was?

The familiar claim that classified technology is decades ahead doesn’t establish that such an AI exists. I don’t have evidence that it does. But that is the question I’d want to explore—not just whether a better chatbot could help us sort some old reports.

AI’s emergence and disclosure could have separate origins and still end up tangled together. A tool that helps us understand unfamiliar intelligence might also force us to reconsider what counts as unfamiliar intelligence in the first place.

That would be rad. And a little unnerving. We start building help for the mystery and end up with more questions about the thing we built.

Toward the end, Elizondo turns the conversation around. What if understanding this subject could make ordinary people’s lives better? Would that give somebody who is busy working, raising a family and paying bills a reason to care?

Well, yes. “There’s something strange out there” and “that strange thing might help us” are going to get different reactions.

I like the hopeful version. But I also notice how much easier it makes the whole subject to approach. Now you’re picturing what humanity might get out of it, instead of only wondering what we might have to be afraid of.

And some of the possibilities are freaking cool. Suppose the way a reported craft moves eventually taught us something that made a long trip take minutes. I’m not talking about shaving a little time off the flight. I mean looking at a place on the other side of the world and realizing the distance no longer means what it did yesterday.

You’d start rearranging your whole idea of where you could live, who you could see, what a normal day looks like. That’s the kind of leap my mind goes to when this subject turns toward technology.

Then I wonder whether the smaller advances we’re getting used to make us more ready to consider something that big. We watch the world change a piece at a time, and something we would have laughed at starts sounding less ridiculous. Maybe that helps explain why the positive framing grabs me.

But getting people excited about the possibility is one thing. Getting that capability into their lives is a whole other story.

Who gets to use it first? Is somebody figuring out how to shorten that trip, or figuring out what an advantage it gives them over everybody who still has to make it the old way?

Elizondo acknowledges the weaponization risk when asked, which is where the hopeful picture gets awkward. You can imagine a discovery changing life for everyone and still picture the first meeting being about how to keep it away from everyone else.

You know what I mean? We get this enormous leap in what’s possible, and then we could do the most familiar thing imaginable with it.

So yes, I’d love to hear more about the good it could do. Tell me about the trip, the energy, the thing we stop having to struggle with. I’m already picturing it.

Now tell me whether helping ordinary people is actually part of the plan. Because I would hate to find out we all got excited about a future somebody only wanted us to watch.