Why superintelligent machines are probably the dominant life form in the universe

University of Connecticut philosophy professor Susan Schneider certainly thinks so. In her new paper “Alien Minds,” she proposes that by the time civilizations are able to communicate by radio, they’re a few short steps away from developing artificial intelligence. One they reached that level of advancement, they may have opted to upgrade their biology to something that’s a biomechanical hybrid or something entirely synthetic. There could be a whole mess of Borg out there, in other words.

She also argues that those civilizations will be older than ours. If a dominant intelligent lifeform developed even a million years before humanity, and within centuries uploaded their brains to alien computers, those computers are likely to be vastly more intelligent than we can even fathom.