It is true, the dogs are evolving. They are more intelligent and sociable than their wolf ancestors…however, they haven’t caught up with language. If I couldonly talk to my dog…what a conevrsation that would be!
(Me); How are you, Buddy?
(Buddy): I want something to eat!
(Me) But you atejust an hour ago!
(Buddy) Dammit, I’m hungry!
(Me) You are getting fat!
(Buddy) I want something to eat…give me some meat!
Can you imagine it! Perhaps a talking dog is NOT a good idea!
Not quite sure if you can call it an animal, but computer technology will soon rapidly leave us behind in the intelligence department. And they will probably not have all kinds of psychological hang ups and excess emotional baggage. Not only could they leave us behind in the intelligence department, but they can be created (create themselves) to be much stronger and ecologically adaptive than any animal on this planet to date. From a possible objective point of view, expecially one that covers an evolutionary timeframe, I would say the fact that we built computers has little to do with the fact that they could eventually be considered a class of it’s own.
It is also very possible that humans and this new class could merge and form a phylum under this new class all it’s own. Cybernetics, human/machine intelligence hybrids, etc. Perhaps one step of our future evolution will be to step beyond the bounds of the biological.
I think you have it backwards.
Right now, on the Cheetah message board, the Cheetahs are idly wondering when the rest of the animal kingdom is going to catch up to them as they are clearly the most evolved because of their superior speed.
The elephants wonder when the rest of the animals will catch up. They are both the largest land animals, and they clearly have the most highly evolved proboscis.
The Dolphins and blue whales laugh good-naturedly at the human claim to superior intelligence. So we’re good tinkerers? Big deal. Kooter on Dukes of Hazard was a good tinkerer.
The whales wonder if the rest of the world will ever approach their capacity for pure mathematics and abstract thought.
The chick-a-dee outside my window wonders idly if the rest of the animal world will ever catch up to it. As it sings its song it is content in its superiority, creating a music no other animal can produce.
To address your question in more depth, I highly recommend the book “Full House” by the late Stephen Jay Gould. It addresses the falacy of evolutionary directionality using a very clever metaphor in baseball statistics.
I know you specified “macrofauna,” but I’d like to point something else out as yet another angle on undercutting the fallacies inherent in the OP. Specifically, dominance can be considered from many points of view; the biomass of all the humans in the world, taken collectively, weighs slightly less than the total biomass of all the ants. Yes, individually, they’re tiny, but there’s approximately ten metric shitloads of them spread over the entire planet. (I seem to recall reading this factoid in the massive tome by Wilson and Holldobler, but it may have been somewhere else.)
Simply in terms of biological success, ants are in the top five. “Intelligence,” whatever that is, has nothing to do with it.
I’d say cold viruses have us beat hands down. Sharks have been around 200 million years or so. Think we’re going to beat that? Intelligence might be highly overrated. We’ve still got a splendid opportunity to wipe ourselves out, without waiting for an asteroid. I think we can’t say we’re a successful species yet.
As for AI - I took AI courses 30 years ago that told me we’d have intelligent machines any day now. Lots of stuff that was researchy back then are products now - direction finding was one of the examples used, as was equation solving and voice recognition. (And chess, of course.) Writing heuristics to do a lot of things we can do is a far cry from developing intelligence. And don’t give me Moore’s Law - fast processors and lots of memories do not automatically make for sophisticated intelligent software. I remember the day the 386 was announced - USA Today said that with all that 16 bit power, AI was in the bag.
So what? I was told many times by “experts” that we would have flying cars by now, and that we would have been to mars by now. Does the fact that we are behind in that disprove the possiblity of it occuring at a later date? I said nowhere in there about it occuring right now, I said soon, from an evolutionary standpoint another 100 years is a very short time. From a technological standpoint 100 years is a whole hell of a long time. How much progress has computers made in the last 100 years? Oh, wait, they have been around for what? 50 years?
Sorry, your little attempt at debunking the idea of AI increasing intelligence beyond our own doesn’t cut it. Just because it was promised 30 years ago and isn’t around now like they “predicted”, doesn’t mean it is impossible.
I’m not sayiong that AI is impossible, like some. The problem is that we haven’t even started yet. And no, none of the cool AI spinoffs we have are anything close real artificial intelligence. In fact, I rather think that the first “AI” won’t be an intelligent program at all, but a simulation of our brain (or a snail’s brain, to start) that will mimic our behavior. That seems like a much easier job, and a computer with that amount of power is inevitable in a reasonable number of years.
By the way, AI is about 50 years old also - Claude Shannon kind of invented it, and one of the texts I used when I studied it was from the late '50s.
Flying cars and trips to mars are purely a matter of technology, politics and economics. If you think the problem of AI is anything like that, you don’t know much about AI.
Scylla’s point is most cogent.
We can never achieve artificial or animal intelligence because we cannnot establish a meaningful definition of the term. The alleged best offering is the so-called Turing test which defines “imteligence” as the ability to successfully mimic human interactions. Okay, not exactly the Turing test, but the essence is that Turing defined intelligence acording to being human like.
Yet to define intelligence as being what we do is self-serving at best, and naive to boot. Intelligence is the ability to solve novel and salient (ethologically significant) problems in the pursuit of achieving a goal. Like Scylla said, whales can outprocess us by far on problems salient to them for goals relevant to them. We can’t even understand the questions.
Humans have changed the nature of the world not because we are individually so smart but because we learn from each other and pasws that information on to future generations. Through culture we function as an uber-organism that has existed for thousands of years. Opposable thumbs, tool use, and that very special tool - language, have all made this posssible. More efficient communication has sped up the process. But we are not really so smart all on our owns if we had no benefit from our group membership.
We have artificial intelligence and animal intelligence already. They are alien to our owns so we discount them. The role of culture and cultures accretions of knowledge is minimal at best for them as well. Design/select for language of any sort and the ability to pass on newly learned behaviors between generations and space, and then you’d get somewhere.
Sentience? I cannot even know if you are sentient. Sentience cannot be observed. It is in our own experience alone.
Self-awareness? Such is a continuum. From biological self vs other of immunological self to the strange self-referential loops of the brain which constantly redefines its self-contained symbols for self in Hoffsteder’s famously described multiple hierarchies of Godelkeit. Such systems are analyzable, measurable, and definable … if the system can be untangled enough to diagram.
What is the best model? Individual ants can not be so hard. Fairly reflexive responses. Yet together the swarm has a functional intelligence solving novel problems. Some good work is being done with swarm intelligence modelling.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Trjckster *
**Hasn’t this scenario already happened in a way, but with modern Homo sapiens exceeding (or matching, who knows) the intelligence of the older Homo species. We stormed out of Africa and in the blink of an evolutionary eye, they were all gone (so we better hope it doesn’t happen again :eek: ). snip.
ITrjckster ,
Slight hijack, the specifics of this scenario may or may not hold water, there are competeing theories of how recent human evolution occured. The multiregional model, which despite popular science magazines’ and TDC’s insistance, has not in any manner been “fully discredited,” posits humans as a species are much older than the widely touted “Out of Africa” model. Replacement may have occurred in some areas, but in other regions a nice continum of morphological characteristics can be found in the fossil record stretching back much further. Homo Erectus (Turkana boy, about 1.6 mya) had basically the same axiallary skeleton as modern humans, stood at six feet and had a cranial capacity of 900cc. Gradual increase in cranial capacity and slight morphological changes to the cranium(less rugose) and you’ve essentially got a “modern human.” By the time of the Neandertals in Europe, who were more likely a cold adapted race than a separate species, you have modern European midfacial prognathism and a cranial capacity fo 1500cc, with no real evidence of a “jump” between here and there. Point being, evolution usually dosen’t follow hard and fast rules and is far more complex than “modern people develop in Africa 100,000 years ago, storm out and wipeout their inferior brethern throughout the rest of the world.” Not picking on you in particular, I’ve heard this theory put forth so many times as fact, I thought I’d give voice to other opinions on the subject. Carry on. End hijack.
Ben
WAG: A lot of obvious improvements just won’t evolve because there’s little short term evolutionary advantage, since a large proportion of people survive to reproductive age. We may see: some form of immunity to infant diseases, larger breasts, more business acumen, basically anything that lets you breed.
Yes, I didn’t see anyone who beat me to it!
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What are you talking about dude, have you ever tried out running a lion? Them things catch up in like 2 seconds!
:smack:
God I am an ass. :smack:
O.K., now I have to post a really old, bad joke:
An old woman lives alone with only her cat. Every night she says, “Oh, Kitty - I’m so lonely. I have noone to talk to. If only you could speak, I’d be so happy.” One night, she’s sitting across from the cat and wishing it could talk, when all of a sudden the cat says, “Look out!”. The women is overjoyed: “Kitty! You can talk, my wish has come true”. As she’s talking, a ceiling beam falls on her head, killing her. The cat says, “Geez, she spends 10 years wanting me to talk; then when I do, she doesn’t listen…”
Sorry…
Here’s the link that I started.
Same idea. I think there are some Dopers posting in both threads.