The post-human era is dawning - Machines will conquer final frontiers...Future bears only traces of humanity...
July 10, 2015 3:16 pm
Cheer up, the post-human era is dawning
By Martin Rees
Artificial minds will not be confined to the planet on
which we have evolved, writes Martin Rees
So vast are the expanses of space and time that fall
within an astronomer’s gaze that people in my profession are mindful not only
of our moment in history, but also of our place in the wider cosmos. We wonder
whether there is intelligent life elsewhere; some of us even search for it.
People will not be the culmination of evolution. We are near the dawn of a
post-human future that could be just as prolonged as the billions of years of
Darwinian selection that preceded humanity’s emergence.
The far future will bear traces of humanity, just as our
own age retains influences of ancient civilisations. Humans and all they have
thought might be a transient precursor to the deeper cogitations of another
culture — one dominated by machines, extending deep into the future and
spreading far beyond earth.
Not everyone considers this an uplifting scenario. There
are those who fear that artificial intelligence will supplant us, taking our
jobs and living beyond the writ of human laws. Others regard such scenarios as
too futuristic to be worth fretting over. But the disagreements are about the
rate of travel, not the direction. Few doubt that machines will one day surpass
more of our distinctively human capabilities. It may take centuries but,
compared to the aeons of evolution that led to humanity’s emergence, even that
is a mere bat of the eye. This is not a fatalistic projection. It is cause for
optimism. The civilisation that supplants us could accomplish unimaginable advances
— feats, perhaps, that we cannot even understand.
Human brains, which have changed little since our
ancestors roamed the African savannah, have allowed us to penetrate the secrets
of the quantum and the cosmos. But there is no reason to think that our
comprehension is matched to an understanding of all the important features of
reality. Some day we may hit the buffers. There are chemical and metabolic
limits to the size and power of “wet” organic brains.
Today’s computers do not learn like we do. Their internal
network is far simpler than a human brain, but they partly make up for this
disadvantage because their “nerves” transmit messages at the speed of light,
millions of times faster than the chemical transmission in human brains. They
can learn to identify dogs, cats and human faces by crunching through millions
of images. They learn to translate from foreign languages by reading
multilingual versions of millions of pages of EU rules, among other documents
(and, crucially, they never get bored).
These are primitive steps, and there is disagreement
about the route towards machines of human-level intelligence. Some think we
should emulate nature, and reverse-engineer the human brain. Others say that is
as misguided as designing flying machine by copying how birds flap their wings.
Philosophers debate whether “consciousness” is special to the wet, organic
brains of humans, apes and dogs, so that robots, even if their intellects seem
superhuman, will still lack self-awareness or inner life. But of the kind of
“thinking” that has enabled humans to understand and then harness the forces of
nature, far more will be done by silicon computers (or quantum ones) than has
ever been managed by people.
Today’s computers have “nerves” which transmit messages at
the speed of light, millions of times faster than the chemical transmission in
human brains
Artificial minds will not be confined to the 14 mile
layer of water, air and rock in which organic life has evolved at the earth’s
surface. Indeed this biosphere may be far from an optimal habitat for
post-human “life”. Interplanetary and interstellar space will be the preferred
arena for the grand constructions of robotic fabricators, including the
non-biological brains that might one day develop insights as far beyond our
imaginings as string theory is for a monkey.
The collective activities of human brains have
underpinned the emergence of all our culture and science. They may not have
been the first intelligences in the cosmos, however, and they are most unlikely
to be the last. Searches for extraterrestrial intelligence are attracting
growing support. Astronomers have learnt in the past decade that there are
likely to be billions of earthlike planets, orbiting stars in our galaxy.
Searches will focus on the nearest of these. But we do not know how likely it
is that chemistry generates life (replicating, metabolising, entities), nor
what chance primitive organisms have of evolving to earth-like biospheres. If
our searches fail, there will be a compensation: if advanced life is
exceedingly rare, we need be less cosmically modest. Our earth, though a tiny
speck in the cosmos, could be the unique “seed” from which intelligence spreads
through the galaxy.
Our era of organic intelligence is a triumph of
complexity over entropy, but a transient one, which will be followed by a
vastly longer period of inorganic intelligences less constrained by their
environment. If life is widespread, worlds orbiting stars older than the sun
could have had a head-start. If so, aliens are likely long ago to have
transitioned beyond the organic stage.
We have no crystal ball. But it is a fair bet that
machines, not organic brains, will most fully understand the cosmos. They may
be our own remote descendants. Or they may be out there already, orbiting
distant stars. Either way, it will be the actions of autonomous machines that
will most drastically change the world, and perhaps what lies beyond.
The writer is the Astronomer Royal
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2015.
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