Them UFO peeps must be laughing their socks off [?] while hearing us calling things 'artificial intelligence' and probably "quantum computing'.
Yeah what is called AI isn't really AI, but the task 'it' can accomplish is impressive. From, 'understanding' and 'answering' questions, to designing new lighter and stronger parts, even solving very complex problems like playing Starcraft, the list is getting longer and longer. It may not be that long until we really cannot distinguish 'AI' from real intelligence... We've actually reached 'Star Trek' level of 'AI' computer; just telling a computer to do something and it doing it was scifi not even 2 decades ago...!!!
Isaak Arthur also, if I remember correctly, theorizes that any 'alien' we might encounter might be just that; an AI rather than biological creatures. Given that space travel would still take thousands of years at speed of light to get anywhere, exploration might come more in the form of self-replicating, repairing, etc., robots, rather than a little green guy in a space suit...
The ironic thing is that humans being so self-obsessed and suffering from delusions of grandeur, even scifi series have humanity being the center of it all, basically 'best' species; Babylon5, Star Trek, Stargate, etc., Farscape was I think one of the first to portray humanity as a lesser species. But yeah, to any sort of technologically advanced aliens, we would likely seem like ants or uncivilized monkeys, with little to no importance.
As Emiya Kiritsugu iconically said: "
True human nature has not advanced a step beyond the Stone Age.". Even as a human living in current time, it's not hard to notice. People are still starting and waging wars for the sake of greed & profit, even risking WW3 in the process... Abject poverty, inequality, the western world is degenerating, literally becoming Orwell's 1984 novel, humankind even failed to prevent its own
cataclysmic downfall...
For all our technical knowledge, the human brain / humans, could never mature enough to deal with the changes to the world that technology has brought. Humanity lost control the monster it has created, and this monster (technology), has destroyed us. Maybe this is an important great filter. Technology, causing the downfall of species.