Large Language Models with Artificial Intelligence (AI) are neural networks whose hardware is very different from the human brain. They consume giga-watts of power instead of tens of watts, they are made of silicon instead of spongy flesh and blood, and their artificial neurons transmit signals at the speed of light. Such signals would have traveled 150 kilometers during the half-millisecond it takes neurotransmitter molecules to travel between synapses in the million-times smaller brain.

These material differences suggest that AI systems represent what we might characterize as an “alien” intelligence. Sure, we can do our best to align AI with humans through extensive training and supervision, but in the long run, this attempt might end up being comparable to putting lipstick on a pig.

Indeed, the fundamental distinction between AI and human intelligence might offer us a first taste of what we may one day encounter through the eventual discovery of extraterrestrial technologies manufactured under unimaginable circumstances on some distant exoplanet.

The Drake equation does little to shed any light on the chances of having such an encounter. Within billions of years, it takes just a single advanced civilization in the entire Milky Way galaxy to fill all of interstellar space with self-replicating probes that are equipped with AI and 3D printers so as to produce copies of themselves out of the raw materials they can find in remote locations.