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A review, by Steven Shapin, in The New York Review of Books [12-1-16, Page 15 ff.] of Jessica Riskin’s book, The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long  Argument Over What Makes Living Things Tick [Chicago], while a bit too academic for readers/visitors here I’m guessing, does provoke a recurrence of my view (speculation/conjecture) that some UFO sightings may be of von Neumann-like probes (artificial machines with sentience or intellect, created and evolved from an advanced extraterrestrial civilization from our galaxy or beyond).

Most of you know my stance: AI machines, scouring the galaxy or universe in an exploratory mode stumbled upon Earth with its diverse life-forms.

One (or more) of these AI machines communicated back to its home base, using (and here comes a new speculation) entangled quantum particles that the AI intelligence(s) have made into a communication language that allows instantaneous messaging.

This would account for the onslaught of UFOs, reported over the eons, and especially in our modern era.

The “evidence” for AI UFOs, for me, stems from a few notable flying saucer/UFO events: the 1948 Gorman dogfight, the 1967 Michalak, Falcon Lake “attack,” the 1973 Coyne helicopter incident, the 1976 Tehran encounter, and the 1979 Robert Taylor “assault.”

There are others, but these UFO “bouts” consisted of AI machines interacting with machines that the probes thought were AI machines like “them.”

The Taylor incident is, obviously, not a machine confronting a machine but the description of the “object” that terrorized Robert Taylor has all the earmarks of a probe, one that mistook a human for a sentient being, so unusual compared to other contacts with actual machinery, that the probe “insisted” on getting to the crux of its discovery.

This is where the book under review comes into play.

The author provides early accounts of automata and the discussions that ensued from such “creations.”

She [Ms. Riskin] offers, at one point, that the Church’s use of automata, in the form of statues replicating Christ’s agony on the cross, ascending Virgin Marys (using screw devices), and other “theatrical” contrivances in the late medieval and early modern eras, produced the philosophical and theological debates about the difference between matter and spirit (by Descartes and others), agency and consciousness, which have led to discussion of human-machines and AI, today.

That we, many of us, see machines approaching sentience, one can, as I do, see a processed gaggle of AI machines being used by a race of beings in an advanced machine civilization, or that advanced civilization being composed of AI machines only, having displaced their creators ages ago, and now searching the universe for like-beings.

Such AI machines, as I’ve noted before, to some controversy by a few, would be attracted to machines, especially flying machines like aircraft, as in the RB-47 encounter or nuclear installations where machines seem to have a computational intelligence, primitive when compared to the extraterrestrial AI visitors but interesting as a possible sentient life-form on our diverse, animated planet.

At any rate, the book is replete, it seems, with rumination about machine life, animated mechanisms that mimic human life, and the arguments of creation by design (via God) and atheism, and all the concomitant exigencies that accrue to such weighty matters.

UFO buffs would do well to take in such discourse, to fulfill their goal of being intelligent rather than loopy, with obeisance to Roswell and other forlorn UFO tales.

RR