Even framing this objects actions using human concepts (benign, malign) is very short sighted. It’s possible any alien life experiences complexities were fundamentally unable to comprehend (there’s some good sci fi short stories that explore this).
And from that perspective, "benign" and "malign" aren't that hard to pick up on. They are relative to humanity, and there is nothing wrong with that. In fact it would be pathological to not care about how the intentions are relative to their effect on humanity.
Whatever happens, it's not like we can actually cause an interstellar incident at this phase of our development. Anything that they would interpret as an interstellar incident they were going to anyhow (e.g. "how dare you prevent our probe from eliminating your species?") and that responsibility is on them, not us. You can't blame a toddler that can barely tie their shoelaces for international incidents, likewise for us and interstellar incidents.
You could theoretically be convinced that they are right and resign yourself to death.
If we did have such a thing, extrapolated coherent volition would be solved and that would solve half of the AI alignment problem.
This hypothetical "alien" problem is actually pretty much equivalent to the AI alignment problem. One half is, we don't know what we want, and the other half is, even if we knew... we don't know how to make "them" do what we want.
It's very fashionable to confuse the inability to draw bright shining lines as being unable to define a thing at all, but I don't have much respect for that attitude. Of all the outcomes, "the probe engages in indefinite behavior that we are never able to classify as 'humanly benign' or 'humanly malign'" is such a low percentage that it's something I'll worry about when it happens.
The world is full of concepts we can't draw bright shining lines through. In fact the ones we can are the exceptions. We manage to have definitions even so.
1. Would your assessment of "malign vs benign" depend on knowing which side was disarmed for each conflict, or can you already make an assessment without that information?
2. Do you estimate that the other 8 billion humans surely agree with your response to #1?
Agreed. One can think of any number of actions that would be impossible to rate on a benign/malign scale. E.g. as a trivial example: aliens destroy 80% of humanity, which leads to restoration of Earth ecosystems and prevention of the inevitable future war that would destroy 100% of humanity; in 100 years humanity is in a much better position than it would have been if left alone [0] [1]
And that doesn't even include intentions. We often do bad things for good reasons, with good intentions. Malignity includes or infers the intention to cause harm. That may not be present, or the intention may have been benign.
Morality is complicated and subjective. Even judging the outcome of an action as positive or negative is complicated and subjective.
[0] I don't really want to argue whether this is true, possible, etc. Pick your own variant of example where a seemingly-malign action is actually benign in the long term.
[1] Also raises the problem of estimating "better" in this context. Exercise left for the reader.
Parents like to believe that all of their seemingly-malignant actions towards their children are actually that. In reality, they only sometimes are, and it's impossible to tell in advance which ones.
What if we have inadvertently caused tremendous offense via our radio/television/planetary radar signals
Possible. But I’d argue unlikely. We can’t make many assumptions about alien life, generally. We can about a technological civilisation that sends out interstellar probes.
Aliens are completely unknowable, that's the thing most fiction trips up on. We don't understand what the hell is going on with other humans. They're like us but different, their motivations sometimes are mysterious or maybe they don't have motivations at all? It's confusing, and those aren't even a different species let alone aliens.
The point is they bothered constructing probes.
My cat isn't constructing space probes. If he up and began doing so this evening, I would be able to conclude certain things about him.
> would be like asking America to account for a discarded Coke can
You're saying you can't conclude anything useful about American culture and civilisation from a discarded Coke can? (As well as the act of casually discarding it.)
> Aliens are completely unknowable, that's the thing most fiction trips up on
Aliens, yes. Aliens who make contact with us, no. The latter is a subset that requires certain attributes and heavily implies others.
Not the op, but I would aver that we have a good chance of concluding false things from the alien version of a discarded Coke can.
Given the subject, I would point to the actor who played the lead role in "The Gods Must Be Crazy" (a story about a discarded coke glass bottle), who did not understand the money he was given for the role: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N%C7%83xau_ǂToma
Right, why did somebody make this metal cylinder covered in elaborate symbology and then place it here? Was this place of great importance to them? What were they trying to communicate to me by constructing the cylinder and placing it?
It's just a discarded coke can. You are the one who decided it's required to have great significance. If you haven't read "Roadside Picnic" I suggest at least reading a summary.
Could an ant? This is the scale we may be operating on. One of the biggest fallacies with the alien question is that they'd operate on our scale. Let alone "think" as we've observed thinking on earth, but that is another story. Some science fiction has explored this concept based on gravity or metabolism leading to dramatically different scale in either space or time for a species and the implications that brings when meeting a species on a different scale.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/His_Master%27s_Voice_(novel)
> We will make it undecipherable for all who are not yet ready; but we must go further in our caution — so that even a false reading will not be able to supply them with any of the things that they seek but that should be denied them.
"hey zarqzon! someone found the camera you accidentally dropped into that asteroid field while trying to take a selfie with that cool gas giant! damn you were so wasted that time"
"what? I just bought a new one as replacement!"