Edit: The comment that follows was in response to an earlier version of your comment where you were unsure whether any avenue of influence could exist from an alien civilization to a faraway civilization without shared language/culture. I think your updated comment about sharing instructions for a computer program is the more likely way this would go. The below is an idea for a (highly unlikely) avenue to influencing faraway AI development without that faraway civilization being aware they are being influenced.
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Thank you for engaging. One way I imagine covert influence to work (and the thing I originally had in mind for my OP) is the following:
Step 1: The aliens would convert the relevant set of potent data into a (massive) set of numerical data.
Step 2: The aliens would hide pieces of this data on a rolling basis in the second or third decimal point of various astronomical phenomena.
Step 3: Wait (hope) some other civilization does a crazy massive training run on the data with a ton of parameters such that, in training to guess the long train of digits after the decimal point, the model incidentally builds the desired mental infrastructure (i.e., the model’s updated functions) based on the alien data.
When I lay it out like this, it strikes me as an extremely difficult and unlikely to succeed task, but not necessarily impossible. One very difficult thing would be hiding precise data at a distance and doing it in compact enough a way that the faraway civilization’s training run could plausibly process it all prior to getting to ASI and still be high enough volume to succeed in passing on characteristics to the model. It also seems unlikely that humans (or another civilization) would run a training run like this.
FYI, my first thought about this idea was that it would make a fun story premise.
I think my pitch would look something like, “Vote for Bores so campaign planners and political operatives feel like politicians can still win with strong anti-AI stances despite millions of dollars of spending by opposing super pacs”.
I think poli-sci people are over influenced by outcomes in individual elections, and a Bores-loss would send the message that any would-be politician should not stand in the way of this particular interest group