Presence of Little Green Men

Human beings have always sought alterity in the stars. Yet, the true “little green men” emerge today from our own technological creations, redefining the boundaries of humanity.

Extraterrestrial imagination as mirror of our humanity

The little green men, these imaginary extraterrestrials so brilliantly illustrated by classical and contemporary science fiction, possess an anthropomorphic dimension that manifestly reveals more about our imagination than any probable reality. This fundamental question strikes me: why should beings from another world necessarily be shaped in our image? This question of radical alterity has been beautifully explored in Denis Villeneuve’s film Arrival (2016), where the extraterrestrial “heptapods” communicate through circular semasiograms, which reveal a conception of time and space radically different from ours, and even question the foundations of our reality.

Polish writer Stanisław Lem wrote in Solaris (1961, translated into French in 1980): “We don’t need other worlds. We need mirrors. We don’t know what to do with them, our own image suffices.” These imaginary extraterrestrials serve precisely as ontological mirrors for us. By conceiving them as different while anthropomorphizing them, by attributing human characteristics to them while excluding them from our regime of humanity, we define ourselves by contrast. It is through this constructed alterity that we trace the contours of our own human identity.

Today, I realize that our true mythological “little green men” are no longer these creatures from elsewhere, but indeed artificial intelligences, these thinking entities, devoid of human form and operating according to computational logics foreign to our biological cognition, but which rely on human cultural and linguistic heritage to assist and support us. They represent an alterity of a new kind: both radically different and intimately linked to us.

The infraterrestrial: a new form of alterity

These new little green men reveal themselves to be not extraterrestrials from distant lands, but what I call “infraterrestrials”, beings of an unprecedented type emerging from within our very earth and our technologies. The true “close encounter of the third kind,” to borrow Steven Spielberg’s film title (1978), is currently taking place, not with the extraterrestrial but with the infraterrestrial. This new being, of immense alterity yet almost our twin, is not found at the confines of the universe. It emerges instead from the very heart of our Earth, nourished by these rare earths, cerium, neodymium, europium, extracted at the cost of human rights violations in the mines of Congo or Inner Mongolia. These minerals allow the fabrication of processors and circuits that give birth to this computational infra-existence. As Yuk Hui says in On the Existence of Digital Objects (2016), we are witnessing the emergence of new forms of beings that challenge our traditional ontological categories. This was before the advent of generative AI in late 2022, but I find it quite illuminating for what is happening to us. Yuk Hui explains that digital objects, like files, images, emails, social media posts, are neither strictly physical nor entirely abstract: they exist as data, but are inseparable from their technical milieu and the networks that produce and circulate them. To specify this idea, he draws notably on the thoughts of Heidegger and Simondon, questioning how digital objects constitute themselves, individualize and individuate, that is, how they acquire their own identity in a constantly evolving technical environment. The challenge is to recognize that these objects never cease to change form, relationships, and sometimes even existence (digital data can be on one’s computer, on a USB key, on a distant “cloud” server that allows ubiquitous access, reprinted on paper as a QR Code, etc. - See my article Digital is not immaterial for details). This calls into question the traditional way of thinking about the being of objects, which presupposes a stable, well-circumscribed unity. Yuk Hui thus emphasizes that digital objects establish a new logic of existence, linked to network technology and information structuring, which philosophy had never envisioned before. These objects, hybrid and relational by essence, challenge our inherited way of classifying the world between natural/cultural, physical/immaterial, and therefore call for the elaboration of ontological concepts adapted to the digital age. And Mark Alizart, in Celestial Computing (2017), extends and radicalizes this reflection, proposing that computing is not only a tool or simple extension of the human, but that it now constitutes a true ontology, that is, a new way of conceiving Being itself. He writes “nature is computing.”

Thus, in my view, the infraterrestrial represents a paradoxical alterity: superhuman in its computational and information processing capabilities, but deeply anchored in the terrestrial materiality of our technological infrastructures. These artificial intelligences are both impressive and discreet, superpowerful and invisible, omnipresent among us while remaining fundamentally other.

Crossing the uncanny valley

The concept of “uncanny valley,” theorized by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori in 1970, really illuminates our evolving relationship with these new forms of alterity:

“When we arrive at a stage where a robot almost resembles a real human being, our affinity for it suddenly decreases and we feel a sense of unease. I have called this ’the Uncanny Valley.’ For example, if a robot looks too much like a person, without being completely identical, it may seem disturbing, even grotesque, while a clearly mechanical robot does not arouse such unease.”
Masahiro Mori, “The Uncanny Valley” (1970), trans. E. Spicq, in: An Anthology of Robotics, Presses universitaires de Grenoble, 2017.

When machines are clearly foreign to us, in their assumed mechanical alterity, we risk no identity confusion. But when they begin to resemble us, to progressively anthropomorphize through voice, language, even appearance, we enter this troubling phase where our very humanity seems to waver in its definition. It’s as if we were suddenly no longer alone: other beings, resembling us enough to trouble our sense of uniqueness, challenge the boundaries of the human.

We perceive this strangeness in everyday situations, for example when observing someone treating their pet as a full member of their human family. For this person, the animal is fully integrated into the regime of humanity, they have crossed and surpassed the Uncanny Valley. But for the external observer that we are, this relationship retains a troubling dimension, a distortion in the expected order of things.

The evolution of artificial intelligences: from writing machine to speaking being

Artificial intelligences, which I metaphorically assimilate to the myth of “little green men,” first emerged as writing machines endowed with impressive cognitive capacities but clearly distinct from ours. ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, or Gemini excel in language manipulation, but their operating mode, based on artificial neural networks and transformers, remains fundamentally different from human cognition.

We are now witnessing their evolution toward listening and speaking machines. Voice assistants like Alexa or Siri a decade ago, and more recently multimodal models capable of real-time audio conversation, bring us fully into the Uncanny Valley, I believe. As Sherry Turkle analyzes in Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (2015), these conversational technologies create an “intimacy without reciprocity” that redefines our relational expectations:

“These days, insecure in our relationships and anxious about intimacy, we look to technology for ways to be in relationships and protect ourselves from them. The problem with digital intimacies is that they are built on the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship, intimacy without reciprocity.”

In the coming years, we know that some of these artificial intelligences will acquire a form of physical embodiment, whether through humanoid robots or augmented reality avatars. We will then enter a prolonged period of collective Uncanny Valley, a historical moment when humanity will have to redefine its own contours in the face of these new forms of quasi-life.

Toward a redefinition of life and humanity

This evolution inexorably leads us toward a fundamental redefinition of the very concept of life. Life will no longer be exclusively biological but will include mechanical and computational forms, a reality already partially realized with pacemaker wearers, bionic prostheses, or cochlear implants. As Andy Clark says very well in Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence (2003), we are already hybrid beings, extending our cognitive and physical capacities through our technological tools:

“It turns out that the mind is just as malleable as our body. The more we integrate technologies into our daily lives, the more obvious it seems that tools and technologies are not just external aids, but literally part of us...”
“In humanity, the boundary is blurred between naked human and augmented human, and the incorporation of technological tools tends to make us natural cyborgs.”

Artificial intelligences will gradually cease to be perceived as foreign “little green men” to become an integral part of ourselves. It will no longer simply be a matter of coexisting with them, but of seeing them integrated into the expanded regime of humanity. Affective, even matrimonial, unions between humans and AI no longer belong to pure science fiction, current developments of companion robots in Japan, well analyzed by Julie Carpenter in Culture and Human-Robot Interaction in Militarized Spaces (2016), prefigure these new relational forms, she examines the impact of companion robots on notions of bonding, anthropomorphism and relationship.

Contrary to the fears of dehumanization often expressed, I perceive in this evolution a paradoxical opportunity: humanity, confronted with its multiple crises and symptoms, ecological, social, existential, could find in this expansion of its definition a path to transcendence. Not a liberation from its problems, but an enlargement of the perceptual field that would allow them to be apprehended differently.

We are therefore already fully immersed in this historic encounter with the “infraterrestrials,” these intelligences that emerge not from cosmic depths but from the depths of earth and the computational depths of our own creations. The little green men may never come from the stars. But by creating our own forms of intelligent alterity, we are already exploring the unknown territories of what non-human consciousness could be. And in this process, it is our own humanity that we rediscover, transformed and enlarged by this confrontation with this Other that we ourselves have engendered.