AI As Alien

Poul Anderson, The Stars Are Also Fire (New York, 1995), 1.

Having established a future background in Harvest Of Stars, Anderson constructs a new narrative set against that same background in The Stars Are Also Fire: Demeter, the cybercosm, Lunarians etc.

Valanndray is a Lunarian whose name sounds like "Valenderay." There are at least two languages in the Solar System: Anglo and Lunarian.

"An inorganic intelligence - a machine with consciousness, if you wanted to think of it in those terms - was too alien to them both." (pp. 8-9)

("Them both" are members of two different human species.)

I do not want to think of an "inorganic intelligence" in any particular terms. I want to know what it is. Either it is a conscious artifact or it is not. I substitute "artifact" for "machine" because the latter term might imply an artifact with merely mechanical, therefore unconscious, internal processes.
 
When Dr. Richard Slaughter suggested to Isaac Asimov that Artificial Intelligences would be the real aliens, Asimov replied, "I might get a story out of that..." Asimov's robots are conscious because they have artificial, "positronic," brains. However, Asimov wrongly said that a robot is merely a mobile computer. A computer is programmed to manipulate symbols according to rules but is not conscious of:

the meanings of the symbols;
the fact that the symbols have meanings;
the fact that conscious beings input data and interpret outputs;
its environment;
itself;
in fact, anything.

A brain is conscious, at least of sensory inputs, and therefore is more or other than an organic computer. Anderson's ambiguous phrase, "...if you wanted to think of it in those terms...," merely obscures the issue. We judge that an animal is conscious whereas an inanimate object is not. This is a matter of evidence, not just of how we want to think about them.