Are “Aliens” Really Robots Billions Of Years Old?

Here’s an interesting spin on the idea of extraterrestrials…one scientist believes that “aliens” are most likely to be robots/artificial intelligence who are nearly immortal.

Are “Aliens” Actually Just Artificial Intelligence?

I argue, then, that man as a species may be coming to an end, subsumed into a higher level of organizational complexity; and a new species may be evolving out of him. I argue, finally, that the hyper-structure is to some degree actively involved in promoting this, since it is an evolutionary process in which it is involved.
–Philip K. Dick

A common theme I read in many accounts of alleged extraterrestrial visitations is that of a metallic, almost electronic voice. Related to that is the paranoid feeling that what the person is really interacting with is some sort of computer. Author Philip K. Dick went so far as to refer to VALIS, the (extraterrestrial? extra-dimensional?) “entity” he claimed to have interacted with/been possessed by, as an “AI”—artificial intelligence.