Hello, SFIA audio listeners. In this month's Nebula exclusive, big alien theory,

we're asking the reason alien civilizations might be rare is because most aliens are huge.

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check out go.nebola.tv slash Isaac Arthur and use my code, Isaac Arthur.

We often worry that humanity might be attacked by aliens or AI, but which is worse and which

would win in a battle between them.

Welcome back to SFIA for another sci-fi Sunday, where we look at concepts from science fiction and apply some science fact to them, and I thought today we would take two

common antagonists for humanity from sci-fi, aliens and AI, and that's not how they might

threaten humanity, but instead how they'd match

up to each other. Now of course there's always a chance that the AI in question might be alien

too, and we looked at that more in our AI aliens episode, but today I thought we would explore

which one, alien or AI, was a greater threat to us and if we might ever see a matchup between them.

There is a lot of scenarios for how that might happen that we'll explore today, with

some vignettes and narratives, but more importantly, we'll start with a real-world concern

and how the threat of aliens might keep us safe from AI.

Now channel regulars know I'm not a big fan of assuming machine minds are somehow automatically

more logical and objective than organic ones, something we'll discuss more to next month

in our episode Automated Justice, but it's a common trait described to high-level AI,

that it should be totally logical.

From this folks assumed that AI, once it got sentient, would conclude that humanity

posed a risk to it.

Maybe not a big one, but we did pose some risk, whereas it could potentially eliminate

...