What ‘evolutionary forces’, exactly? Humans, our one example of technological life, don’t appear to be under evolutionary force to expand exponentially any more, in fact some current projections are that human population will reach a steady number by 2070 http://www.iiasa.ac.at/web/home/about/news/20141023-population-9billion.html .
Study more neuroscience. You’re wrong.
As for spaceflight and eternal expansion - you’re wrong as well. The birthrate thing is a more complex issue than it appears on the surface, and it’s actually an example of variable reproduction rates resulting in the more fecund people becoming dominant.
What does this mean? Dominant how?
As in, fastforward enough time, and they are the only beings in existence.
Naah. The fact that life arose as soon after the LHB as possible (if not before it, even) kind of points to it being relatively trivial to get it started. Which, given the cosmic prevalence of precursor organics, should not be surprising at all. There is no bottleneck, I believe - anywhere suitable, life will arise.
How, exactly, is the digitally-stored media of an extinct species going to communicate itself to us? It doesn’t matter if some intelligent species stored its info, if they wiped themselves out, they’ve earned a 0 in the Drake Equation.
So, returning a little bit to the original question…
One of the problems in the OP’s phrasing is “conclusively” proving the existence of life. It’s possible that we’ll see something so obviously life-like that we can close the book and celebrate life on Mars, something like the adenosine triphosphate detectors on earlier probes…
but it’s also possible that we see something that isn’t conclusively anything. Let’s say we find a briny foam with chemically reactive properties. Is this life in a form without simple Earth-like cell walls, perhaps only with replicating molecules? Perhaps a self-replicating molecule of chlorophyll? Or is it a lifeless primordial ooze that is chemically active, but not self-replicating?
And what if all we find are fossils? Confirming life from a fossil relies less on chemistry and more on finding a recognizable shape. A leaf or a bone would be pretty obvious. An algal slime layer… not so much.
I predict that we will either “hit a home run” and get a simple confirmation of life soon (as in, by the end of the century), or we’ll spend centuries eliminating different possibilities. Maybe at some point, we’ll arrive at 99% certainty there’s nothing life-like on Mars, but it seems unlikely to me that we’ll ever be able to answer “no” with 100% confidence.
(To a large extent, it’s like Bigfoot on Earth. Proving existence would take just one captured specimen. Proving non-existence will never have exactly 100% certainty.)
And you base this on…what? The same out of your ass gut feeling about the FP which is wrong? The prevalent scientific theory is that life is probably pretty common in the universe, though, of course, we haven’t been able to prove that yet. One of the reasons we are so interested in Mars is to try and see if life did form there, if it was similar or dissimilar to our own, and whether it’s still there somewhere, since on earth extremophile life is pretty pervasive wherever there is liquid water. Your dismissal of the possibility of life based on the FP is pretty laughable, really…especially since you’ve doubled down.
We don’t even know if the FP is a real effect…it’s basically a theory to try and explain a very incomplete set of data. And it has nothing whatsoever to do with whether life did or didn’t originate on Mars, or anywhere else.
This isn’t even a theory, just some mumbo jumbo babble. Evolution doesn’t have an end goal leading to intelligence. For literally hundreds of millions of years the earth was roamed (or swum) by creatures that didn’t have any and didn’t need any. They were able to reproduce quite successfully without it, which is what Evolution is all about. Intelligence wrt a branch of species able to use advanced tools and use higher levels of communications were a fluke on this planet…there were myriad times our species or species that lead to us could have died out and then there would be no technological species capable of even asking this question on this planet, and any alien philosophers trying to figure out why their version of the Drake Equations don’t seem to work out would be talking about something like the FP themselves. 
Seriously, this is pretty basic stuff and you don’t even seem to get those basics, and, basically, you are just wrong.
[QUOTE=Chronos]
The Viking landers included tests for adenosine triphosphate (which came up negative). That’s a chemical that’s found in all living cells on Earth, and which would be extraordinarily unlikely to exist without life… but we have no particular reason to expect that life unrelated to us would use that particular chemical.
[/QUOTE]
It is of course extraordinarily difficult to design an experiment to test for life as we don’t know it. If life as we don’t know it can exist on Mars then no experiment can be guaranteed to recognise it.
I should also mention the very large possibility of false positives in any experiment looking for life; the Labelled Release experiment on Viking gave what appeared to be a positive result, but this was later determined to be a false positive caused by the exotic but abiotic chemistry on the Martian surface.
I suspect that almost every experiment we can devise might be vulnerable to some kind of false positive, making it not only impossible to detect life as we don’t know it, but also impossible to prove that life as we do know it is present.
If I’m really wrong about neuroscience, it shouldn’t be too hard to point to a respectable source for the thousand-fold increase being likely. But I doubt that any serious sources are going to say that, it’s going to be limited to wide-eyed ‘futurists’ who are engaging in wishful thinking rather than science.
I would like to see a cite that shows humans creating an AI as intelligent as a human (in general, not for a specific, narrow task) and something that shows a progression that could lead to a 1000 fold increase in a reasonable time… but I don’t think you’re going to find one. I would also like to see a cite showing conclusively that these thousandfold smarter beings that we create will expand like bacteria. There’s no reason to expect that, and lots of reasons to expect that a superhuman intelligence would have it’s own goals and objectives.
I’m citing the entirety of the available evidence about technological civilizations you’re… just making bald assertions. Human birthrates are leveling off at the present time, that’s empirical fact. You think that there will be an evolutionary pressure towards ‘fecund people’, but it’s not clear that’s the case or that other humans would go along with unlimited breeding (cite please, if you’re going to argue that it’s definitely the case).
And on the flip side, if there is evolutionary pressure for people to desire to breed more and more, and no pushback that slows or stops this, then one possible explanation for the Fermi paradox is death by overbreeding. Maybe a civilization does like you say, but ends up using all of the easily accessible nearby material, then dies out from not being able to support the latest batch of kids. Space colonization to relieve population pressure is not feasible with realistic spacecraft, and with realistic speeds travel times will be so long that you’d need to manage population during the trip - which your evolution-driven super-breeders either won’t do, or could do back on earth to relieve population pressure.
Again, the thousandfold (and more) increase in intelligence has already happened. AI is not necessary. The system that is so much smarter than a human is not a computer, but a group of communicating humans.
Chronos, you are incorrect. This is why. Another reason is the very reason we are still having this argument. The reason we are arguing is that
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We cannot share our memories and experiences with each other, so each of us is arriving at faulty conclusions due to differing data. (I know each of you has made clear and glaring logical and factual errors, and I know that I cannot be perfect either)
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We cannot share mental techniques with each other, either. If we could share a rational decision making model, and data, we would be synchronized and would not be arguing stupidly.
This is true for every human endeavor. Countless human institutions and groups make glaring, catastrophic errors daily because
a. They don’t use rational metrics as individual humans lack the brainpower to use them and there is disagreement over what the right answer is
b. There is fallback to incorrect reasoning methods (“gut feel”, “groupthink”, kowtowing to the alpha male)
c. Since rewards are distributed unevenly and through making specific groups “liable”, catastrophic errors are made by institutions protecting themselves as the expense of everyone else
Just to name a handful of such catastrophic errors I can think of at the top of my head :
The FDA delays medical progress, killing millions of people as a consequence, to protect the FDA from blame if they let a product through that has not passed the full bureaucratic suite of testing
Society funds medical research on kneejerk “feeling” campaigns rather than facts, for example, yesterday’s football game was all about breast cancer, when far more women die from heart disease
A group of politicians can openly take bribes from energy companies and can openly pretend that changing the gas composition of the earth cannot have any negative consequences whatsoever.
If we were digital beings, we could share data and we could build decision making assistance systems that would improve our intelligence by using correct logical and mathematical methods to rapidly assess situations. Also, due to Amdahl’s law, for most projects such as design of new technology, like, oh, factories that copy themselves, antimatter production machines, solar panels, starships, that kind of thing, speeding up the critical path 1000 times means the engineering gets done 1000 times faster. We wouldn’t need “shifts”, even if as digital beings we had to sleep, we could probably do it much faster and more efficiently, and/or just share memory data with the next “shift” if necessary. If we were digital beings, our indefinite lifespans would mean that we would be motivated to complete projects that won’t show rewards for centuries, because we personally would be there to see the results. Remember we were discussing starships? Even if, for technical reasons, only very slow interstellar travel is possible, if you are a digital being, waiting 1000 years to reach Alpha Centauri is feasible. You could slow your internal clock and make it perceptibly take only 5 minutes.
The idea that we will make ourselves into immortal digital beings who can instantly share our memories and do things a thousand time faster than non-digital humans and adjust our interest levels to work indefinitely or thinking speed to sit out a thousand year trip, but will still be driven by bacteria-like instinct to expand and reproduce for not reason other than ‘evolutionary pressure’ doesn’t seem very consistent with itself. The idea of hyperintelligent beings who can modify and customize their own minds but who can’t stop URGE TO BREED doesn’t really hold together well for me.
Maybe not, but what does evolution say?
A species that retains the urge to breed will breed faster than the others. They’ll fill up the galaxy faster than others. They will outcompete the others for scarce resources. Perhaps a hyperintelligent alien species would even be smart enough to realize that.
And this intercommunication is likely to be the future of so-called ‘artificial’ or synthetic intelligence. (Synthetic in the sense of being able to convey ideas and test concepts into a cumulative whole, not ersatz or false). Machine intelligence based on software running on digital hardware is becoming increasingly obvious as a dead end. It is certainly possible to simulate behavior–even learning behavior–using software, but the essential linearity of constructed programming and non-mutability of hardware imposes restrictions how just how flexible an machine-based ‘intelligence’ can be in developing and evolving.
Digital computers are computationally and energy intensive when it comes to working out problems with incomplete data or massively complex and multi-valued inputs, essentially having to revert to brute force statistical analysis even when applying Bayesian ‘learning’ processes and Markov chain type reasoning, whereas human and animal brains seem to solve these kinds of problems with inexplicable ease. Of course, evolution has had hundreds of millions of years to work out advanced cognition and we’ve been working on digital computers in ernest for about the last seventy years, so there is still a bit of catch up to do, but from a conceptual standpoint we’re at about the same place as we were with general artificial intelligence circa 1960.
However, our methods for letting people communicate and convey ideas have and continue to improve on an essentialy exponential curve. From the development of writing to the printing press, up to e-mail, bulletin boards, and modern social media, we’ve increased how quickly an idea can be disseminated with greater fidelity and illustration (excepting Twitter) in a scale measured in orders of magnitude, as the adoption of e-mail and development of internet and graphical web protocols specifically for technical and educational use demonstrates. Social media is largely used for trivial purposes like updating your location and sending ‘selfies’ to your friends, but as data scientists know, all of this information, processed using complex filtering and averaging systems, has given a major revolution in predicting human behavior at both an aggregate and personal level. Privacy advocates bemoan the loss of control over personal information but the reality is that people are mostly sharing this information of free will in the implicit expectation that it somehow serves their purposes, and that ‘web’ of information is being used as a feedback control to optimize things like marketing, production and distribution, fashion trending, spending patterns, et cetera.
That the very same tools could also be put to use in optimizing human learning and technical advancement–not by crowdsourcing to a random collection of people but acesourcing to practical experts in individual skill areas or experience to solve a problem faster than a single person or unitary team–is just beginning to be understood. When it is, however, traditional approaches to resourcing, training, education, and recruitment, and indeed, employment in general, will have to be completely rethought. That we might also be able to functionally improve cognition on an individual level through gene therapy or pharmaceutical enhancement is also possible and even likely, but just putting minds together and facilititing clear communication is a revolutionary leap in and of itself.
By comparison, ‘uploading’ minds to computing hardware–something we have aboslutely no idea how to do–much less improving on the sort of cognative abilities brains do so well and computers do poorly or not at all, is at best speculative and probably unlikely. Even if we can create a true general artificial intelligence in a machine, it likely won’t ‘think’ or experience the world the way we do. Even if we move beyond organic materials, the replacement won’t look anything like microprocessors and pin connector interfaces.
Stranger
Evolution is a theory based on empirical evidence, it doesn’t include a command from God to ‘go forth and multiply’. It certainly doesn’t say either ‘breeding without bound is what you should do’, or ‘breeding without bound is always a successful strategy’. All of our empirical evidence says that once a set of creatures develops high technology, it stops trying to expand exponentially.
Or perhaps they’ll fill up their available space and waste scarce resources on their obsessive breeding program, and end up either exterminated by non-breeding-obsessed intelligences who want to use those resources for their own, slower purposes, or just dead of their own excesses, or stuck in a limited area because they burnt out too many resources to be able to expand distances. Breeding does not always mean that you win the fight, especially when you start talking about hyper-intelligent digitized superhumans.
Or they will realize early on that all the outcompeting in the Universe won’t change the eventual outcome for their species with the Big Crunch, so what’s the point, might as well take things slow and enjoy the ride. And leave something for the other intelligent inhabitants that follow you, because why not?
The (IMO erroneous) assumption I see people making is that hyperintelligence necessarily entails robotic emotionlessness coupled with species-level egomania. And yet altruism is just as likely an eventual outcome of evolution as selfishness - we are certainly way more altruistic as a species compared to, say, lemurs. Those assholes.
Digital != microprocessors. I mean the use of discrete, albeit high resolution, values. The human brain itself, like any practical analog system, is itself only capable of a certain level of signal resolution, and so a digital system with finite resolution can model it perfectly.
The reason I use the world digital is that if humans were housed on digital hardware, you can
- Copy minds from one system to another
- Check data files and backups for integrity and correct errors using well known mathematics that reduce the chance of errors to “less than once in the remaining life of the universe”
- Stream state differences from one system to another with perfect fidelity
And a hundred other useful tricks. De facto, except for the whole life of the universe problem, this takes the “mortality” out of “mortal humans”, because you can copy a digital being to new hardware forever with perfect fidelity, or back it up and restore it later, or send a copy on a dangerous mission but stream the state changes back so that nothing is lost when that copy is destroyed.
It seems kind of important to me personally that we do this, and it really ought to be important to you fellas as well.
I never meant anything that used modern microprocessors as a structure, those are too slow. I mean a set of digital circuits that physically resembles the brains they emulate - basically a pile of chips on a set of boards in 3d, and on each chip, every synapse gets a dedicated state machine with local, nonvolatile memory to represent the inter connectivity and current state of that synapse. Most network messages between synapses would travel extremely short distances to adjacent synapses through dedicated circuit paths, although a global network bus that can address anything does exist so you can perform backups and debug it.
The chips would either be constructed to emulate a specific individual’s brain, or they would be semi-re-configurable, and there would be chips constructed to be optimal to emulate specific regions of a typical human brain. There would be extra unallocated state machines that can emulate new neural connections.
Eventually we’d find a way to build a gigantic 3d cube that emulates an entire brain as a single component.
What does any of that speculative, um, stuff, have to do with the OPs question here in GQ??