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Why The Future Doesn't Need Us
Concealed writes "There is an article in the new Wired which talks about the future of nanotechnology and 'intelligent machines.' Bill Joy, (also the creator of the Unix text editor vi) who wrote the article, expresses his views on the neccesity of the human race in the near future.
" From what I can gather this is the article that the Bill Joy on Extinction story was drawn from. Bill is a smart guy -- and this is well worth reading.
io% diff -u bar foo
--- bar Tue Mar 21 11:11:19 2000
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Concealed writes "There is an article in the new Wired which talks
about the future of nanotechnology and 'intelligent machines.' Bill
- Joy, (also the creator of the Linux text editor vi) who wrote the article,
+ Joy, (also the creator of the Unix text editor vi) who wrote the article,
expresses his views on the neccesity of the human race in the near
future. " From what I can gather this is the article that the Bill Joy on Extinction
story was drawn from. Bill is a smart guy -- and this is well worth reading.
And no admission on Slashdot/Hemos' part. Shame on you.
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My comments and opinions completely reflect those of anyone and anything I am remotely associated with.
My one criticism of Joy's anaylsis was his disregard toward writer's of speculative / science fiction. Listening to Joy's interview last week on NPR, he basically stated that he had come to his doubt and uncertainty after "real" writers like Kurzweil had commented on the possible dangers of nanotech and runaway AI. So "fake" writers like Bear, Gibson, Benford and Brin---and I count at least three hard science PHDs there---they must lack the vision to make "real" speculative commentary on the future of emergent and possible technologies. They join the "fake" ranks of unreliables and nuts like Clarke and his silly comsat idea or Wells and his bizarre ideas concerning the proliferation of advanced tech weapons. And let's not mention that buffoon Jules Verne. I don't question Joy's own technical credentials. Nor do I necessarily disagree with his analysis. I simply found his discounting of spec.fic. writers as condescending and typical of the mundane society that can only catch up with a concept when its featured on Entertainment Tonight.
Why do people feel so threatened? Each generation is "replaced" by the next. Yet few parents see their children as threats. In a healthy relationship, we not only fail to fear succession by our progeny, we actively encourage it. Everyone wants their kids to "go further" than they themselves did.
Other than the utterly irrelevant fact that these descendants will be silicon and metal, not carbon and water, is there any difference? These AIs will be heirs to Plato and Descartes, Jefferson and King, just like we are. Unencumbered by two megayears of grungy evolution, they might even get it right. Does it matter that they are not "flesh of our flesh"? Why should flesh matter at all?
Almost everyone seems to come to the brink of recognizing the commonality but then they veer away. What defines "humanity"? Is it really 46 chromosomes in a particular order? I argue instead that it is our intelligence that makes us special, our thinking ability. I won't get dragged into the old argument whether this means cold-blooded logic only or whether it includes human emotions (but I will say that I agree with the latter.) But no matter how you define it, no matter what features of human existence make us human, those features are not inextricably linked to our "ugly bags of mostly water".
The greatest fear I have is not that we will be replaced. It's that short-sighted species-centric thinking will obscure, delay, or throw away the trans-historic opportunities we will have in the coming century.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
The problem here is the implication that one day, a bunch of humans, just like us, are suddenly going to find themselves obsolete, and either destroyed, or perhaps ignored, but some new, superintelligent entity that they created. But I don't see it happening that way.
Instead, what we will see is a series of gradual changes. Genetically superior humans won't appear overnight. Instead, humans will be slowly made superior, genetically. Superintelligent robots won't suddenly appear. Instead, they will slowly improve, and around the same time, I firmly believe that hardware will start being connected to human brains and human limbs.
So yes, in a thousand years, the rulers of this earth may not seem much like what we'd call human. But I'm willing to bet that if you looked over the period in between, you wouldn't see "humans" going extinct. You'd see a slow process of evolution (not darwinian, but directed) towards something greater. You'd never be able to find a dividing line between "human" and what's next.
And while that may be frightening to some, it isn't really to me. We are "greater", at least in certain anthropomoprhic senses, than the ape-like creature that we are descended from. But that creature did not "go extinct". It evolved into us. Something is going to evolve from us. This doesn't necessarily mean that we're all going to die at the hands of some sort of "SkyNet" AI. It just means that we aren't the be-all and end-all of creation.
The human race won't be supplanted by "homo superior". It will become "homo superior".
The cake is a pie