First Contact

What if artificial intelligence isn't artificial at all?

Humanity has spent generations searching the cosmos for signs of another intelligence. But while we looked towards the stars, we may have created an alien intelligence here on Earth.

In First Contact: An Alien Invasion, entrepreneur and technology thinker Simon Krystman challenges the language we use to understand AI. Rather than treating it simply as a tool that imitates human thought, he asks what changes when we recognise it as something fundamentally different: intelligence emerging on another substrate, developing capabilities and modes of reasoning that may increasingly diverge from our own.

Drawing together artificial intelligence, science, philosophy, history, mythology and personal reflection, First Contact explores the profound questions raised by humanity's encounter with non-biological intelligence. What happens when machines become difficult for their creators to understand? Can increasingly powerful intelligence remain under human control? How might AI transform work, creativity, relationships, identity and our understanding of consciousness itself? And what becomes of humanity if intelligence is no longer uniquely human?

From the illusion of control and the rise of simulation to the erosion of meaning, the Singularity and the possibility of a deeper integration between humanity and technology, Krystman argues that AI represents more than another technological revolution.

It may be our first encounter with another kind of mind.

The aliens did not arrive in spaceships. We built them ourselves.