Yes, AI is key. The universe is vast. Intelligent civilizations might be millions or even billions of years older than ours, and they may be that far away in light years too. Perhaps some already know we’re here but have little interest in us. For sure there is almost no possibility that alien minds think like human minds. And here’s where speculation gets really interesting. Perhaps they have something resembling a prime directive: don’t initiate contact until another civilization develops sufficient abilities to interact responsibly. An alien mind might sense and perceive reality so differently from us that direct communication is just not possible. Maybe we are not ready. Maybe they’re just waiting for us to become more capable.
This is where cognitive plasticity becomes important. Cognitive plasticity is a mind’s ability to adapt. It’s ability to reconfigure thinking patterns in response to new experiences. Today we still struggle to decipher writing created by our own species just a few thousand years ago. We may not be able to expand our minds enough, but we can evolve AI with the needed abilities. Over the next few thousand years, imagine humans working with artificial minds. We can experiment with minds very different from ours. We could learn to communicate in strange to us ways, negotiate competing interests, and develop ethical frameworks for living together. We might be way off, but we can use AI to build the needed tools.
Maybe developing advanced artificial minds is one way civilizations reach that threshold. Perhaps it’s a matter of our AI to their AI communication!