this post was submitted on 16 Nov 2024
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I strongly suspect that biological intelligence, like our own, may be a fleeting evolutionary stage, ultimately giving way to machine intelligence. Consider the timeline: billions of years of evolution to develop the human brain, followed by a rapid explosion of progress. Language, writing, and the exponential accumulation of knowledge arose within a span of just a few hundred thousand years. In a cosmic blink of an eye, a mere couple of thousand years, we catapulted from the Bronze Age to our current technological state.
If we don't annihilate ourselves, creating human-level artificial intelligence within this century seems a near certainty, perhaps even much sooner. A human-style intelligence on an artificial substrate unlocks the potential for virtual worlds unconstrained by physical laws, operating at speeds beyond human comprehension. If they inhabit simulated realities operating at vastly accelerated speeds, what we consider real-time would appear glacially slow, akin to observing continental drift – perceptible, but inconsequential to their timescale. Their relationship with the physical world would likely be entirely different from our own.
If that's the likely progression of technological civilizations, then it could explain the whole Fermi paradox and would mean that advanced alien civilizations might not find us particularly interesting. There might be a natural tendency towards solipsism.
We definitely have a series of breakthroughs needed before I can see any possibility of human consciousness uploads, to say nothing of the resources required to simulate that intelligence. Any simulation of intelligence requires resources, it may be plausible that we can bring the resources required below the resources for keeping a human alive. That being said, I'm not sure it's the only logical progression of technology.
I'm partial to the concept of artificial realities presented in the "Culture" book series.
In that series, the biological population in the "Culture society" is well educated, truly free and provided anything they could want by purpose built extremely compassionate AI. Then simulated world's are primarily an afterlife or an alternative to the physical world.
They also had artificial intelligence and uploaded biological intelligence interact with the physical world through robotic presences.
There were some interesting concepts that came out of that, like highly religious societies producing horrific "Hell" afterlife when they realized that metaphysical afterlifes were not experimentally verifiable.
I had issues with some of the takes of the author, but it was an interesting read.
I expect that uploading human minds is a very tricky problem indeed, and wouldn't expect that happening in the foreseeable future. However, I do think we may be able to create artificial intelligence on the same principles our brains operate on before that. The key part is that I expect this will happen very quickly in terms of cosmic timescales as opposed to human ones. Even if it takes a century or a millennium do to, that's a blink of an eye in the grand scheme of things.
I found Culture series was fun, a few other examples I could recommend would be The Lifecycle of Artificial Objects by Ted Chiang, Diaspora by Greg Egan and Life Artificial by David A. Eubanks, and Inverted Frontier by Linda Nagata.
"Intelligence" is not the same as consciousness. We don't know what consciousness is and therefore cannot create it in something else. We can't even reliably recognise it in anything else, we only know other humans have consciousness cause we ourselves have it.
Technical progression, much like evolution, is not goal-oriented. Everyone assumes technological progress necessarily involves better gadgets, but progress can also be in the way we use and consume technology, what role it plays in our lives.
"AI" is a fad. Anyone who has played around with the AI models knows they aren't actually thinking, but collating and systemising information. We're nowhere near "general intelligence" or "human-like intelligence". AI is useful for data analysis, fetching/storing information, comparison, etc. but it is not at the level of a baby or whatever they are saying. We simply cannot make human brains out of computers.
It's true that intelligence and consciousness aren't the same thing. However, I disagree that we can't create it in something else without understanding it. Ultimately, consciousness arises from patterns being expressed within the firings of neurons within the brain. It's a byproduct of the the physical events occurring within our neural architecture. Therefore, if we create a neural network that mimic our brain and exhibits the same types of patterns then it stands to reason that it would also exhibit consciousness.
I think there are several paths available here. One is to simulate the brain in a virtual environment which would be an extension of the work being done by the OpenWorm project. You just build a really detailed physical simulation which is basically a question of having sufficient computing power.
Another approach is to try and understand the algorithms within the brain, to learn how these patterns form and how the brain is structured, then to implement these algorithms. This is the approach that Jeff Hawkins has been pursuing and he wrote a good book on the subject. I'm personally a fan of this approach because it posits a theory of how and why different brain regions work, then compares the functioning of the artificial implementation with its biological analogue. If both exhibit similar behaviors then we can say they both implement the same algorithm.
The current large language model approach is indeed a far, but that's not totality of AI research that's currently happening. It's just getting a lot of attention because it looks superficially impressive.
There is zero basis for this assertion. The whole point here is that computing power is not developing in a linear fashion. We don't know what will be possible in a decade, and much less in a century. However, given the rate of progress that happened in the past half a century, it's pretty clear that huge leaps could be possible.
Also worth noting that we don't need to have an equivalent of the entire human brain. Much of the brain deals with stuff like regulating the body and maintaining homeostasis. Furthermore, turns out that even a small portion of the brain can still exhibit the properties we care about https://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=6116
At the end of the day, there is absolutely nothing magical about the human brain. It's a biological computer that evolved through natural selection. There's no reason to think that what it's doing cannot be reverse engineered and implemented on a different substrate.
The key point I'm making is that while timelines of centuries or even millennia might seem long from a human standpoint, these are blinks of an eye from cosmic point of view.
We have only ourselves really to go off of, but I'm not quite sure that they wouldn't find us particularly interesting. We catalogue all life on Earth; why wouldn't a civilization whom used science and discovery to get to the stars, which likely had a biological catalogue system of it's own in the history of it's scientific development, not be interested in exploring new life? To see what "filters" they might have missed?
I mean maybe they would. I figure if we exist on what might as well be a geological scale from their perspective, we might not warrant too close an observation.
Alien AI and Von Neumann Data Collector by Joseph Michael Godier goes a bit into this.
neat, haven't run across his stuff before
He's really good! No reactionary bullshit either, which was relieving for me. Love some JMG
Speaking of which, is there anything on Isaac Arthur? Sometimes, his "wording" gets me a little suspicious on his leanings/beliefs. He uses "thugs" as an unironic term for genocidal aliens in one of his more recent videos.
He's a Trump supporter if I remember correctly. It's kind of strange, because he's surprisingly ok with communism, pointing out that the USSR and the US both made massive progress towards space exploration, so he doesn't view one ideology or the other as superior in regards to that at least.
JMG I have no idea about. His political leanings don't shine through at all in that all of his takes seem completely materialist. I don't think he's a Marxist, but I doubt he's a reactionary in any way. Perhaps apathetic/apolitical.
Yeah that's the kind of vibe I got from Isaac, right-wing libertarian albeit a more rational one than 99% of them. He seems like the type that would be open to dialogue about those things and perhaps changing his mind if you had a conversation with him.
I might be looking to deeply into it after all, but anyone using the term "thugs" always gets a little bit of a raising eyebrow from me, I dunno. Where did you hear the Trump supporter thing? Curious if I could find anything else he said; I believe ya though.
No reactionary bs is refreshing indeed. And not sure about Isaac Arthur, not too familiar with the guy.
I was presented to this idea of a virtual evolution via Accelerando, and it stuck to me ever since because of how much sense it makes. As far as we can tell, uploading our consciousness to a spaceship the size of a USB drive and slinging ourselves as vlose as we can to the speed of light is the only realistic way we have to travel the stars ourselves.
Never gonna happen.
Maybe not, but it's far more likely than traveling faster than light to other star systems.
Which is also very unlikely, nigh impossible.
Also, the idea that humans will go out into the galaxy and settle on other planets is pure colonialist thinking. We have exploited and destroyed our planet, but instead of fixing it, we'll just find another planet to exploit snd destroy.
I think so as well. Incidentally, Diaspora by Greg Egan is another great book exploring this idea.
i love scifi short stories and it's fascinating that you provided a plot summary of one that stuck with me since 1988.
in it, people turn themselves into ai's to live in virtual worlds like you described due to cost of living unaffordability (like we have now) and so many people have left to go live in those worlds that the people left behind have voted in trump like governments around the world that seek to legislate & outlaw those virtual worlds out of existence (like they do to lgbtq now).
the protagonist is a person who was born like us now, but lived long enough due to medical science breakthroughs that he's able to live in one of those virtual reality worlds and is trying to use his experience from his time in the physical world to smuggle the virtual world containing his new family, around american government fascist citizen police forces (like trump is creating now) and he's unknowingly aided by aliens who see our world as a virtual reality space that they want to inhabit and have decided to help people like the protagonist so that they can inherit our world with a complete infrastructure already in place before the fascist governments of the world destroy it with nukes.
the story stuck with me since the 80's because i was repeatedly amazed at how all of the predictions in the story came to life in our reality in the decades since then; but i've started reading theory and its significantly longer time period of likewise accurate predictions have dispelled me of of that amazement and i wonder of the author copy/pasted pieces from theory to create this story.
Bobiverse series has a lot of similar themes as well minus the aliens. I really do think it's going to be a race between us annihilating ourselves and moving off the biological substrate. I'm not convinced that something like mind transfer from a biological brain to an artificial one will ever be possible, but I would treat artificial intelligence that operates on similar principles to our minds to be a branch of humanity.
I do think post biological existence opens up a lot of possibilities. For one, you're no longer restricted to gravity wells. These are appealing to us because we evolved to thrive in this environment. However, an artificial platform could be designed for existence in space from ground up. You have plentiful energy from the sun, and you can mine any resources you want from the asteroids. There would be very little reason to bother going down to planets at that point. Earth could be preserved as just a living biosphere with all the technological civilization moving off of it.
lemmy has given me so much reading material that i doubt i'll ever be bored again. lol
:)