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Astrobot Ella, Artificial Intelligence traveling in space
You probably don’t know, but she’s traveling to the solar system HIP 4872 in Cassiopeia constellation. She’s mankind’s ambassador. She’s not a living being. It’s a chatbot. An old, primitive chatbot from 2003 whose code is written in VisualBasic.Net.
In that year, however, it was one of the most advanced bots. He had won the Loebner Prize Contest, a competition between software that took place as part of attempts to pass the Turing test. For this reason, “astrobot Ella” was chosen to be sent, after being transformed into a high frequency transmission, by the Evpatoria radio telescope in Ukraine. The transmission lasted more than an hour, during which the 119 MB of the “Cosmic call” left the planet Earth at the speed of light, bit by bit.
If ever, in 2036, anyone will understand the transmission (HIP 4872 is 32.8 light years away) and will be able to run the program on some strange alien computer, they will face artificial intelligence. Of course, perhaps the inhabitants of that star system will appear to have an approximate intelligence (to be benevolent) but they will surely have fun playing blackjack, listening to terrestrial jokes and horoscopes.
But I have some fears for 2069, when we will receive the possible reply message: what if, at the most, they invited us to play Pac-Man?
Sources
Daniel Oberhaus, “Extraterrestrial Languages“, The MIT press, 2019
Epstein, Robert, Roberts, Gary, Beber, Grace, “Parsing the Turing Test.Philosophical and Methodological Issues in the Quest for the Thinking Computer“, Springer, 2009
