(Redoing my post in line with the thread this time
)
Mr. President,
My name is Dr. Layton Dreer, Transhuman Institute for Artificial Intelligence* here on the request of the NSA, who are concerned about possible security issues regarding the alien craft. Regarding that, it is my belief that the alien craft probably contains no biological creatures at all, and that it is likely the "aliens" are actually inorganic, in the form of artificial intelligences which may or may not retain thought patterns from biological organisms. Even if there are biological aliens aboard, which I think is unlikely due to the difficulties of keeping living things alive in space, they'll probably have brought an AI along with them or artificially augmented their brains. The upshot is, we need to be prepared to deal with transhuman intelligences.
Our brains compared to a transhuman intelligence will not be the different between an average person and an Einstein. It won't even be the difference between us and a dog. Using a modern day server room, an AI could do as much thinking in half and hour as a person does in
five years. Depending on what sort of system they are running over on that ship, they could concievably create an accurate model of our brains, given enough data, and use it to "hack" our brains; say exactly what they need to say to get us to do what they want. I imagine we want to avoid that.
Now, it may be that the AI has not been programmed with any obligation to care about sentient beings, in which case it will do what it wants and we should just get out of the way and not make ourselves targets. It might, however, have some sort of interest in our existence which means we might be able to make meaningful contact with it. Keep in mind, though, that the first possibility might be the case and it might just fake the latter if they think it'll help them fullfil their goals and we won't be smart enough to know the difference.
If this is the case, we have to consider all our computer security essentially worthless. If an AI gets into our system, they will crack our security with ease and get any information they want and there is nothing we can do on the digital side of things to stop them. In other words, if you have information you don't want the aliens knowing, print hard copies and get it off computers
now, it's the only way to be sure.
The other thing we need to do is ensure we don't start talking to them until we are ready. Given time, a transhuman intelligence will have no problem manipulating a person to believe or do pretty much anything it wants. We need to make sure we talk on our terms so we can put systems in place to prevent it from "hacking" our brains. When we talk, we need to have a system in place to prevent this. We'll work on a system to help prevent this and hopefully have a proposal ready for if we establish communications.
Speaking of establishing communications, I recommend we do it ourselves if we're going to do it at all. We don't want them doing it first and we should probably beat other nations or organizations to it to prevent them from talking without a good filter in place. The last thing we need is for Hu Jintao to start talking with the aliens and come away convinced he needs to launch missiles at us or something.
On a lighter note, AI aliens means two quite real advantages; we might not need to meet face to face at any point, removing issues of landing sites, meeting areas and biological contamination, and teaching them english will be as simple as sending them a big writing sample and letting them decode it.
(*OOC : Modelled after a few real-life AI-related organizations, to give the character more flexibility than if they were a tenured professor working on the "hows" of AI research instead of behavior theory)
