ORGANIC INTELLIGENCE HAS NO LONG-TERM FUTURE

MARTIN REES

Former president, the Royal Society; emeritus professor of cosmology and astrophysics, University of Cambridge; fellow, Trinity College; author, From Here to Infinity

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The potential of advanced AI and concerns about its downsides are rising on the agenda—and rightly. Many of us think the AI field, like synthetic biotech, already needs guidelines that promote “responsible innovation”; others regard the most-discussed scenarios as too futuristic to be worth worrying about.

But the divergence of view is basically about the time scale—assessments differ with regard to the rate of travel, not the direction of travel. Few doubt that machines will surpass more and more of our distinctively human capabilities—or enhance them via cyborg technology. The cautious among us envisage time scales of centuries rather than decades for these transformations. Be that as it may, the time scales for technological advance are but an instant compared to the time scales of the Darwinian selection that led to humanity’s emergence—and (more relevant) they’re less than a millionth of the vast expanses of time lying ahead. That’s why, in a long-term evolutionary perspective, humans and all they’ve thought will be just a transient and primitive precursor of the deeper cogitations of a machine-dominated culture extending into the far future and spreading far beyond our Earth.

We’re now witnessing the early stages of this transition. It’s not hard to envisage a hypercomputer achieving oracular powers that could offer its controller dominance of international finance and strategy—this seems only a quantitative (not qualitative) step beyond what “quant” hedge funds do today. Sensor technologies still lag behind human capacities. But once robots observe and interpret their environment as adeptly as we do, they will truly be perceived as intelligent beings, to which (or to whom) we can relate—at least in some respects—as we relate to other people. We’d have no more reason to disparage them as zombies than to regard other people in that way.

Their greater processing speed may give robots an advantage over us. But will they remain docile rather than “going rogue”? And what if a hypercomputer developed a mind of its own? If it could infiltrate the Internet—and the “Internet of Things”—it could manipulate the rest of the world. It may have goals utterly orthogonal to human wishes—or even treat humans as an encumbrance. Or (to be more optimistic) humans may transcend biology by merging with computers, maybe subsuming their individuality into a common consciousness. In old-style spiritualist parlance, they would “go over to the other side.”

The horizons of technological forecasting rarely extend even a few centuries into the future—and some predict transformational changes within a few decades. But the Earth has billions of years ahead of it, and the cosmos a longer (perhaps infinite) future. So what about the posthuman era—stretching billions of years ahead?

There are chemical and metabolic limits to the size and processing power of organic (“wet”) brains. Maybe we’re close to these limits already. But no such limits constrain silicon-based computers (still less, perhaps, quantum computers): For those, the potential for further development could be as dramatic as the evolution from monocellular organisms to humans.

So, by any definition of thinking, the amount done by organic, human-type brains (and its intensity) will be swamped by the cerebrations of AI. Moreover, Earth’s biosphere, in which organic life has symbiotically evolved, is not a constraint for advanced AI. Indeed, it’s far from optimal; interplanetary and interstellar space will be the preferred arena, where robotic fabricators will have the grandest scope for construction and where nonbiological “brains” may develop insights as far beyond our imaginings as string theory is for a mouse.

Abstract thinking by biological brains has underpinned the emergence of all culture and science. But this activity—spanning tens of millennia at most—will be a brief precursor to the more powerful intellects of the inorganic, posthuman era. Moreover, evolution on other worlds orbiting stars older than the sun could have had a head start. If so, then aliens are likely to have long ago transitioned beyond the organic stage.

So it won’t be the minds of humans, but those of machines, that will most fully understand the world. And it will be the actions of autonomous machines that will most drastically change the world—and perhaps what lies beyond.