One way to study #MachineIntelligence is with more powerful #space #telescopes.
Even though we have yet to find examples of other civilizations out there, they certainly are there to be found. There is a growing consensus among scientists that extraterrestrial #technosignatures might well be more common than #biosignatures. After all, machines can prosper in all the wide space while biospheres require very specific circumstances.
#Biospheres are also very difficult to detect.
Even if planetary life was fleeting and oft erased by asteroids and gamma ray bursts, once autonomous machines start replicating in space they become practically invulnerable to #extinction.
Why haven't we found examples yet? Well, we don't quite know what to look for. If you look at astronomy as a field, we almost routinely find things which have no convincing explanations. As these observations often do not repeat, we just shrug and move on.
Most search for extraterrestrial intelligence so far has focused on planets and biospheres, and only recently we have been starting to look more seriously with a wider focus.
Regardless, the space is huge, it extends in the cube of the distance, and we haven't really scratched the surface of it yet.
We might well gain crucial insights into machine intelligence with one of the next generation space telescopes instead of through our own experimentation. At least we know that paperclip maximization doesn't really seem like a thing, that we would have noticed already.
Daniel Pomarède
Tero Keski-Valkama
Aldo de Moor