On the BBC, Richard Hollingham wonders if the reason why SETI has not picked up on any alien transmissions is because "most of the intelligence in the cosmos [...] is synthetic intelligence," created by no longer existing organic creatures.
From the self-aware death machines of the Berserker books to the cyborgs of Battlestar Galactica or The Terminator, science fiction certainly has a rich seam of AIs taking over and wiping out their inferior biological creators. It is not, however, necessarily the inevitable path of any technological civilisation. Artificial Intelligence – truly thinking machines with synthetic super-brains – may not even be possible.
“It’s very unclear to me that this is inevitably going to happen,” says Clark. “But the key point is we are looking for something we imagine to be a bit like us and we’re limiting the search as a result.”