“We are talking to aliens now, just didn’t come to us the way we thought they would. I don’t think (the film) 2001 anticipated they would think in completely different ways from us, and would not understand the differences. They talk to us as if we were them, the same way your cat thinks you’re just a bigger cat.”
Perplexity provides the following analysis:
Winer’s metaphor is doing a few interesting things at once, and it’s sharper than it looks on first read. At the surface, “aliens” refers to AI systems—entities that are clearly intelligent in some sense, but whose internal structure and way of “thinking” are not human-like. The key claim isn’t just that they’re different, but that the difference is opaque in both directions. Continue reading