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Could AI and Tech Advancements Bring a New Era of Evolution? (noemamag.com) 117

Posted by EditorDavid from the transhumanism dept.
A professor of religion at Columbia University writes, "I do not think human beings are the last stage in the evolutionary process." Whatever comes next will be neither simply organic nor simply machinic but will be the result of the increasingly symbiotic relationship between human beings and technology. Bound together as parasite/host, neither people nor technologies can exist apart from the other because they are constitutive prostheses of each other... So-called "artificial" intelligence is the latest extension of the emergent process through which life takes ever more diverse and complex forms.
The article lists "four trajectories that will be increasingly important for the symbiotic relationship between humans and machines."

- Writing about neuroprosthetics, the professor argues that "Increasing possibilities for symbiotic relations between computers and brains will lead to alternative forms of intelligence that are neither human nor machinic, but something in between."

- Then there's biobots. The article argues that with nanotechnology, "it will be increasingly difficult to distinguish the natural from the artificial."

But there's also an interesting discussion about synthetic biology. "Michael Levin and his colleagues at the Allen Discovery Center of Tufts University — biologists, computer scientists and engineers — have created "xenobots," which are "biological robots" that were produced from embryonic skin and muscle cells from an African clawed frog." As Levin and his colleagues wrote in 2020...

Here we show a scalable pipeline for creating functional novel lifeforms: AI methods automatically design diverse candidate lifeforms in silico to perform some desired function, and transferable designs are then created using a cell-based construction toolkit to realize living systems with predicted behavior. Although some steps in this pipeline still require manual intervention, complete automation in the future would pave the way for designing and deploying living systems for a wide range of functions.
And the article concludes with a discussion of organic-relational AI: While Levin uses computational technology to create and modify biological organisms, the German neurobiologist Peter Robin Hiesinger uses biological organisms to model computational processes by creating algorithms that evolve. This work involves nothing less than developing a new form of "artificial" intelligence... Non-anthropocentric AI would not be merely an imitation of human intelligence, but would be as different from our thinking as fungi, dog and crow cognition is from human cognition.

Machines are becoming more like people and people are becoming more like machines. Organism and machine? Organism or machine? Neither organism nor machine? Evolution is not over; something new, something different, perhaps infinitely and qualitatively different, is emerging.

Who would want the future to be the endless repetition of the past?
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Could AI and Tech Advancements Bring a New Era of Evolution? More

Could AI and Tech Advancements Bring a New Era of Evolution?

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  • It's all fun and games unril we all become Borg.

    • Re:Borg? (Score:5, Funny)

      by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Sunday November 19, 2023 @05:28AM (#64015901)

      It's all fun and games until we all become Borg.

      Why is the Borg a bad thing?

      They had full employment, universal healthcare, etc.

      Hive animals (ants, bees, mole rats) are very successful.

      STNG was just anti-Borg propaganda.

      • Re:Borg? (Score:5, Informative)

        by Spazmania ( 174582 ) on Sunday November 19, 2023 @06:31AM (#64015955) Homepage

        The Borg was originally a collective. Voyager redefined them as a hive so they could have a big bad queen. It was disappointing because a techno-organic collective with enforced obedience to instantaneous consensus was much more interesting.

        • You can't have a dramatic series ended at earth with the entire human fleet waiting to set off the trap to kill the queen if there's no queen.

          As depicted pre queen the borg are literally unstoppable. They'd have to destroy every single one or find a galaxy wide method to disrupt their communications. Neither is as thrilling as a big space battle with pew pew pew cgi explosions and the audience cheering.

          • They're not unstoppable, just determined. Nor are they unreasoning; they just need the right confluence of reasons to move the consensus.

            • One borg can make another borg and apparently has all knowledge of the entire Borg race.

              If you wiped out every Borg in the universe except one they could restart if that Borg was on a high tech world or even a low tech world with the right mineral resources to recreate advanced technology eventually. Then off it goes into space to find some tourists to borgify in mission 1 to restart its race. Then around mission 23 the entire Borg army is at earth's door.

              • The Hugh episodes suggest otherwise. Though not accustomed to thinking that way, an individual borg severed from the rest is just an individual.

                • Hm, ok fair point.

                  In that case there seems to be a need for some minimum number of Borg to establish a collective and suppress individuality.

                  Is there anything in the lore that says how many? Is 2 enough? 10? 1000?

                  If our one surviving Borg makes another then there is a risk of the whole race coming back but as you note maybe they wouldn't do that if they were alone.

                  • Two borg make consensus decisions and then both act according to the consensus. The borg aren't fundamentally evil, they're just the polar opposite of individualists. They don't think for themselves, they don't act for themselves and they don't imagine a reality in which thinking for yourself is a good thing.

                    In fact, a later Hugh episode shows a part of their society in complete breakdown solely because of the introduction of the -concept- that individualism could be a path toward beneficial evolution.

          • But The Borg ceased to be frighting in any (other than the Marvel-Comic-Villian sense) once they were given a defined leader.

    • That, or just as likely, Morlocks and Eloi.

      • I was thinking more along the lines of Asimov's Foundation. Nobody will know how to do anything any more, all they can do is consult the machines.

        (All human knowledge will be based on the year 2023?)

        • > I was thinking more along the lines of Asimov's Foundation. Nobody will know how to do anything any more, all they can do is consult the machines.

          That's certainly true, as long as they have electricity. Otherwise, it will be more like the mid to late 1800's with steam power, and anyone with serious health problems dies.

  • Hmm, seems like we get the Crapularity first (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Casandro ( 751346 ) on Sunday November 19, 2023 @04:41AM (#64015845)

    I mean yes, in theory we are getting to another level of breeding, by actually modifying the genome of species. We already do this in areas like insulin production.

    However at the same time we see technology getting more and more crappy. We see researchers storing genetic data in spread sheets... which mangle the contents of the cells because they think a Gene is a calendar date. We see people using browsers as GUI toolkits, creating barely usable applications which barely work, yet consume insane amounts of resources.

    This is what's called a "crapularily". It's the more realistic alternative to the "singularity" where better tools enable us to make better tools which then eventually will make better and better tools themselves, eventually surpassing us. What we see instead is that we get worse and worse tools, with which we create worse tools, destroying any advance in technology, until we eventually are barely able to sustain our society.

  • Mod Submission Flamebait (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 19, 2023 @04:45AM (#64015847)

    A professor of religion at Columbia University writes, "I do not think human beings are the last stage in the evolutionary process.

    Evolution doesn't have a 'last stage' other than I guess whatever is around immediately before everything goes extinct. But more even than that, why would we be reporting on what a 'professor of religion' has to say on the subject? You couldn't find any taxi drivers to ask?

    • Re:Mod Submission Flamebait (Score:5, Funny)

      by Black Parrot ( 19622 ) on Sunday November 19, 2023 @04:51AM (#64015855)

      The nice thing about religious authorities is that they give you the absolute truth.

      Also, you've got so many varieties to choose from.

      • Which religion are you?

        Answer.

        Ah. Which denomination?

        Answer.

        Interesting. Which faction?

        Answer.

        It's turtles all the way down.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by bjoast ( 1310293 )
      You often hear this from people who have an almost religious idea of evolution as being a straight, progressive march towards organic sophistication. A genetic bottleneck could of course cause AI advancements and biotechnology to affect human evolution, but likely in the manner of humans having to rely on this technology for survival or reproductive success.

    • My Uber driver was too busy driving in heavy traffic to write down his thoughts on computer aided evolution.

    • Scoffing at someone who sincerely searches for knowledge about religion through academic study is just as pointless as scoffing about someone who sincerely searches for knowledge about the the physical universe through study. Do you disguise yourself to conceal that you scoff at science or do scoff at the rigorous academic study of religion? Or just a general airing of irony as you post as anonymous coward and fling diminutive scoffing the way of those who seek to know more and search it out with honest hea

    • Even if all life on Earth ceased to exist, evolution remains a drunk walk and continues on.

  • I already feel like a chunk of my frontal lobe resides on The Internet, so I can completely see symbiosis between human and machine continuing to evolve, especially with the way things have been going (closed-loop prosthetics, smaller and smarter devices, everything being shoved onto The Internet that used to be done either in-person or by letter, etc).

    • I planted devices aren't evolution. Your dna is still your dna.

      What you're describing is a long ago dismissed theory that essentially said if we chop off a mouse's leg then its offspring should also be missing a leg. And similar for other non genetic physical changes. This is obviously crap and they should easily seen this wasn't true at the time (how many soldiers with missing limbs came back from war and had kids with missing limbs? None) but the theory still was the predominant belief for a long time

  • About time they are all replaced with degenerative "AI", so that we at least get better grammar.

  • Pfft. It took 80,000 years for us to erase neanderthals. It won't take anywhere near that long for machine intelligence to erase us. If we're lucky, they'll be kind enough to let us live out our pathetically short lives in peace.
    • Isn't that a quote from the Hollywood film, "The Creator"? Plus, that wasn't the message of the film. It argued that AI isn't like us in that way.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Only one tiny problem: There is no machine intelligence. There is not even a credible theory how it could be created. That means it could be impossible or a few 100 years away at the very least.

    • Re:Wishful thinking (Score:5, Informative)

      by HiThere ( 15173 ) <charleshixsn@ear ... .net minus punct> on Sunday November 19, 2023 @10:33AM (#64016171)

      The Neanderthals were never erased. They also weren't reasonably considered a separate species, merely a regional variety. There were lots of other regional varieties, and "region" can be pretty large. The Denisovians ranged from the Philippines to Tibet, with at least an outpost in Siberia.

      You hear that our genetic code is x% Neanderthal or some such, but you don't hear what percentage is specific to CroMagnon. But we share most of our DNA with Chimpanzees, so it's got to be a rather small number.

      FWIW, there's decent evidence that the Neanderthals and other regional varieties were evolving in the direction of being separate species, but none of them had gotten all that far. There kept being crosses that moved the gene pool back together. People were just too mobile.

      P.S.: One should always be skeptical of claims that a newly found fossil is a separate species. The right to name the species is too attractive to too many people, and when the only evidence you have is a few bones, it's easy to build the picture you want to have.

    • The Neanderthals bred into the homosapien line. They're not wiped out. They're "us".

      Before a machine intelligence can wipe us out there would have to be a machine intelligence first.

      No one had the slightest clue how to build one or what technology would even be required to build a machine intelligence.

      LLM is not machine intelligence nor is it a step on that path. LLM is a nice pattern matching tool. Nothing more. You want to find or extract patterns from complex noisy data? LLM. You want machine inte

  • It might lead to professors for religion to die out at last.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by narcc ( 412956 )

      So ... you don't think you can study religion academically? Do you think religious scholars are the same as priests or something?

      I'll bet you even call yourself a "rationalist"...

      • Re:I hope so (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Malenfrant ( 781088 ) on Sunday November 19, 2023 @07:40AM (#64015999)
        Professor of Religion is not much different than a Professor of Literature specialising in a small subset of literature. A Professor of Sci-Fi, or Professor of Crime Fiction, for example. Studying comparitive religion is just comparing types of stories people tell each other. Studying why people believe these stories has more worth, but that's a form of psychology and is rarely what Professors of Religion actually study.

        • Re:I hope so (Score:5, Interesting)

          by Potor ( 658520 ) <farker1&gmail,com> on Sunday November 19, 2023 @10:54AM (#64016217) Journal
          It's really interesting that nobody has bothered to name this professor of religion, who is quite well known in intellectual circles: Mark C Taylor. Taylor is not religious in the proselytizing or theological senses, but rather is interested in the interplay of religion and society in its different guises (e.g. technology, architecture, literature, etc.)

        • "Professor of Religion is not much different than a Professor of Literature specialising in a small subset of literature. "

          That 'subset' would be a handful of 'holy' books instead of thousands?

      • "So ... you don't think you can study religion academically? Do you think religious scholars are the same as priests or something?"

        I'm sure they have an imaginary friend, otherwise they would have studied something that brings something to their wallet or betters humanity.

        Studying the stupidity of mankind does not help, it has to be eradicated, not studied.

        But you can pray for me.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by narcc ( 412956 )

          You're really going to double-down on your complete ignorance, eh? After being told that you're obviously wrong by multiple people? After being presented with facts that stand in direct contradiction to your completely baseless assumptions? Amazing.

          You should stop thinking of yourself as a rationalist. You're the farthest thing from it. You're an absolute embarrassment.

    • Really? A trivial number of academics studying religion is your biggest concern in the world?

      You got serious first world problems going on.

      Are you equally upset when you can't park directly in front of a store and have to walk an extra 20 feet?

      • "Are you equally upset when you can't park directly in front of a store and have to walk an extra 20 feet?"

        Obviously it must be the wrath of the gods.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by narcc ( 412956 )

          I love how all you seem to be able to do when presented with any idea you don't agree with is to accuse the other person of being religious. You don't address the idea, just imply that the other person is irrational... without even a hint of irony. Amazing.

          • "I love how all you seem to be able to do when presented with any idea you don't agree with is to accuse the other person of being religious."

            Moi? How could I do that, it would need a medical professional.

            "You don't address the idea, just imply that the other person is irrational"

            Which idea you are hinting of, the existence of Gods, the people studying shamanism and Wikka?

            "... without even a hint of irony. Amazing."

            Or mayby your irony detector is on the fritz again, or I might just be too subtle sometimes.

  • But not for about 100 years. And that's assuming politicians don't ruin it.

  • This is hogwash (Score:4, Interesting)

    by InterGuru ( 50986 ) <jhd@NoSpAM.interguru.com> on Sunday November 19, 2023 @08:46AM (#64016035)
    We have been preceded by dozens of civilizations. They all collapsed. Will ours be an exception? Our globalized society is very fragile, physically, socially, politically, and financially. All it will take is a financial collapse, a solar storm bringing down our grid, a nuclear war, an unstoppable pandemic, or some other similar happening brought on, possibly, by the stress of global warming. The whole infrastructure needed to support AI or for that matter, the internet will evaporate. Darwinian evolution will continue add its own pace.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Yep, pretty much. Most people have no clue how fragile civilization actually is.

    • Re:This is hogwash (Score:5, Interesting)

      by HiThere ( 15173 ) <charleshixsn@ear ... .net minus punct> on Sunday November 19, 2023 @10:54AM (#64016219)

      If that happens, expect things to collapse far enough that there is a population crash, and recorded knowledge becomes inaccessible. I think we'd crash back farther than the flint-lock, though black powder would probably be retained, metal refining would not.

      If you think that's likely to happen, you should take up fletching and bow making. Or possibly the use of a spear-thrower. Also how to identify useful plants. Expect big game to be gone for your lifetime, as it will be more than decimated during the population crash. But rabbits should do well. (But beware of "rabbit-fever". You need more fats in your diet than rabbits can provide.) Also expect packs of wild dogs (whose ancestors were feral). Individually they should be readily domesticated, but you've got to get them as pups. Deer will come back as the pre-made guns wear out.

      Note: Small groups of farmers are not safe. There will be roving bands. Unless you've got your own "tribe", best to hook up with one. OTOH, there probably won't be any horsemen. The horses will have been eaten. Eventually cattle may return, but there aren't very many bulls anymore, so don't really expect it. Pigs, though, will survive. And be dangerous.

      • Rabbit fever is bacterial, not an issue of fats.

      • Why so far back?

        Steam power was used heavily in the 19th century. It only takes a water boiler, a heat source, a few pipes and whatever it is you're trying to drive with it. Voila! Trains are invented again!

        And it's not like 100 years from now or whenever this tech apocalypse occurs the world wouldn't be flooded with all the old tech still sitting there including those pipes, boilers, etc.

        The rest of what you're saying is like some sci-fi book. There aren't enough bulls? As if bulls are monogamous? C'

  • No, AI is not "God". No, current AI is not even AGI and as dumb as bread. No, there is zero indication this will change. Go look for your surrogate religion someplace else and keep it out of the public.

  • we've already stopped evolving (Score:5, Interesting)

    by v1 ( 525388 ) on Sunday November 19, 2023 @10:18AM (#64016139) Homepage Journal

    That started about the time of the industrial revolution, when things like "social services". Now we have ADA, prosthetics, insulin, lasic eye surgery, and all other manner of things we do to make up for defects.

    Evolution requires some degree of cruelty to be effective, and we're fighting hard against it. Natural Selection is no longer a contributing factor to human evolution, and we're starting a backward slide. We're going to have to continue the push to gene therapy and the (unfortunately somewhat unpopular) technology of embryo selection to get Natural Selection back in the game somehow.

    If you think it's bad having a tray of pills to pop every day by the time you reach 80, imagine that when you're 20. That's where we're headed. Kids getting lasik at age 5 since 95% of the kids born have terrible vision. An ever-increasing list of "standard" corrective surgeries at young ages.

    This really isn't even about evolving, it's about preventing de-evolution. Selection (Natural or otherwise) is necessary, not just to evolve, but even to just hold the line. Our genome is designed to randomly mutate and expects selection to keep the bad mutations from entering the communal gene pool. We don't want to do it to the population, and (for now) we don't seem to want to do it at the embryo level. But that's going to have to change, or humanity is doomed in the long run. We'll just experience an agonizing "gene pool rot" over the generations otherwise.

    • I enjoyed your comment because it shows a level of competence regarding evolution and a supposed human takeover of the process.

      I have issues with some of the "Now we have ADA, prosthetics, insulin, lasic eye surgery, and all other manner of things we do to make up for defects."

      Fixing defects is an elective because the efforts do not work toward reproductive success. While the quality of life is important to an individual's well-being, evolution is a drunk walk and may undo temporary work.

      I'm reminded of the

  • No. Computers are tools not magic (Score:4, Insightful)

    by iAmWaySmarterThanYou ( 10095012 ) on Sunday November 19, 2023 @10:21AM (#64016151)

    So tired of this "AI will change EVERYTHING!!!" nonsense.

    Lemme know if we ever develop a true artificial intelligence that can learn on its own from its environment instead of these clever neural net pattern matchers. Then we can talk about how a sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic.

    All known existing "AI" are just clever pattern matching tools. We have had neural nets for decades. The only new thing is much faster computers are orders of magnitude cheaper now than 30+ years ago so building them is financially viable.

    It's just another tool, people. It improves human efficiency. We are not going to evolve into human/LLM cyborgs.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jd ( 1658 )

      If AI is used to augment the brain, then we don't need Strong AI, we only need a neural net that is sufficiently biologically correct that the brain can use it to extend a part of the brain that already exists.

      Now, I think that the surface of the brain is linked to language, is that correct? If so, we can (in principle) piggyback onto this a neural bet in which virtual synapses form more readily. As such, it aught to be easier to learn languages, non-communicative autistics should find communication possibl

      • We are so incredibly far from wiring up our brains to a neural net computer or anything else that it's sci-fi to talk about anything like that.

        Right now there are a small number of people in highly experimental programs with very specific illnesses or physical damage that have had various bits run into their brains attached to other devices such as artificial eyes, ears, or direct spine communication to their legs which restore them to some respectable measure of function,

        This is nothing like a brain.comput

    • Well, please allow ChatGPT to retort:

      1. Modern AI, especially deep learning models, goes beyond simple pattern matching and exhibits complex decision-making capabilities.

      2. The quest for "true artificial intelligence" may be subjective; current AI systems already display adaptive learning, challenging the notion that AI is merely a pattern-matching tool.

      3. Faster and cheaper computers have facilitated AI development, but dismissing AI as "just another tool" oversimplifies its transformative potentia

      • Please provide your exact prompt so that the rest of us, in the spirit of the scientific method, can reproduce your results.

      • lol, thanks, that was a cute answer from gpt. Entirely wrong but amusing.

        It entirely missed a key element of intelligence. It can't learn on its own. A new born baby is a learning sponge. From nothing to holding meaningful conversations by age 4-6 (varying) without millions of training runs from some selected data set. Learns its parent's language from just hanging around them. Truly amazing stuff. As opposed to a neural net which force feeds millions of tiny tweaks to the neural net until they're gi

        • OK, I'm sorry. I guess my joke was a bit too obscure. If you ask ChatGPT anything about AI, LLMs, & the like, the output reads with a strong bias & as if it's been coached quite heavily on that particular topic. You can imagine why the owners of OpenAI might want that to be the case.

          • Oh, I assumed chatgpt provides an extremely specific set of human written answers approved by the lawyers for AI related questions.

            I'm just saying the answers are mostly wrong and ignore a critical difference between what chatgpt is and true intelligence.

            We're on the same page here.

  • Typical from the religious crowd (Score:3)

    by RUs1729 ( 10049396 ) on Sunday November 19, 2023 @10:50AM (#64016209)

    "I do not think that the human beings are the last stage in the evolutionary process."

    The typical ignorance about the fundamentals of evolution by natural selection from the religious crowd. When are these people going to learn that evolution is NOT a teleological force? There is not, and there cannot be, a last stage in the evolutionary process for as long as there is matter with the basic properties for evolutionary processes to happen.

  • I think, and my thoughts cross the barrier into the synapses of the machine - just as the good doctor intended. But what I cannot shake, and what hints at things to come, is that thoughts cross back. In my dreams the sensibility of the machine invades the periphery of my consciousness. Dark. Rigid. Cold. Alien. Evolution is at work here, but just what is evolving remains to be seen.

    Commissioner Pravin Lal, "Man and Machine"

  • As humanity becomes increasingly dependent on them.
    Most will become incapable of saving themselves when they fail.
    And big, complex anything is guaranteed to fail at some point.
    Just look at what is currently happening in most urban areas for a glimpse of the future.

  • ... and the variable "money" does not appear. It's a major motivator for directing the advancement of the human/AI pairing.

    Evolution, in the traditional sense, is a random process that takes an enormous amount of time. Let's not conflate that with instant gratification of money as a remora to the progress of AI.

  • The writer of the article exhibits a common fundamental misunderstanding of evolution because they present humans as the pinnacle of evolution where everything else is just a step on the way to "us" and whatever we become. Where in fact, every single living organism is merely the frontier of a long history of "just good enough" organisms that were its an ancestors. Every organism right now is the "last stage" in its own line.

  • Who would want the future to be the endless repetition of the past?

    This has all happened before. And it will happen again.

  • Can't wait to see who will be the first human to be hacked out of its brain. I bet the NSA and the likes of Unit 8200 are salivating at the opportunity to tap directly into their people's brain.

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