cheer up, the post-human era is dawning - ft

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July 10, 2015 3:16 pm

Martin Rees

Artificial minds will not be confined to the planet on which we have evolved,writes Martin Rees

o vast are the expanses of space and time that fall within

an astronomers 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 asprolonged as the billions of years of Darwinian selection that

preceded humanitys 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 humanlaws. 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 humanitys 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.

Cheer up, the post-human era is dawning

er up, the post-human era is dawning - FT.com http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/4fe10870-20c2-11e5-ab0f-6bb9974f25d0.html

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Todays computershave nerves which

transmit messages at

the speed of light,

millions of times faster

than the chemical

transmission in human

brains

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Todays 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.

Artificial minds will not be confined to the 14 mile layer of water, air androck in which organic life has evolved at the earths 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 forextraterrestrial 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, whichwill 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


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cheer up, the post-human era is dawning - ft

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