The future of… Humanity?

 

How big can you go? This big. Today, I’m posting a bit of an essay that I wrote some time ago, the results of a thought experiment I undertook in which I asked the question “Where is humanity going?”. I wanted to try to figure out the logical conclusion to all of our perpetual industry and began to deduce, along the way, some of the reasons why we do it. I hope you find this interesting.

I will begin with an assertion. This assertion is based on the evidence of our collective history and the successful continuity of human life itself. It is thus:

All advances in technology have a ultimate unified aim – to increase the efficiency of information accessibility for the purposes of enhancing the probability of making more effective decisions in order to ensure the survival of our species.

Some advances are primary in forwarding this aim – some are secondary or even tertiary. Take for example the automation of a task, such as was achieved by many machines during the great industrial revolution. This negates the need for a person to perform manual work by which they would otherwise be using up limited time and energy resources. A noble cause in itself perhaps – but why? What is the need to increase the efficiency of task completion and reduce waste, when there exists no immediate obvious higher goal. More time to spend on other, perhaps more pleasurable things. 

If we consider that huge amounts of time and energy have themselves been spent on pushing advances for the cause of task automation, we conclude that this activity itself is clearly highly prized. Why? For what purpose does humanity hurl itself at solving the problems of task inefficiency? Perhaps there are many drivers, particularly those whose result is the increase in production of dopamine. Regardless, evidence suggests a continuation of this pursuit and the only logical conclusion to all of this activity is that all human tasks eventually become automated and the human removes any need for itself to be involved in any activities any more in order to guarantee the continuation of itself. If the need to survive is ultimately the primary driver in the evolution of our activity, then this need is ultimately completely catered for. The very purpose of our existence, rendered obsolete through our own innovation. We ourselves become surplus to our own existence. What higher plane of being do we then occupy in the world where all threats to the existence of ourselves are thoroughly nullified? Where existence is simply for existence sake…

In fact, the implications are far more severe than this. If we have entirely neutralized all threats to the continuation of ourselves and automated all systems for ensuring the continuation of this status quo, then we will have engineered systems so complex as to blur the lines between life and un-life. Engineered, artificial intelligence that is so complete as to dwarf the capabilities of any human, or even any number of humans that could ever exist. So unthinkably aware, that the human mind would be to this system, or these systems, like that of a plant’s to a human.

Which begs the question, would this AI be and remain benevolent? The human was the ultimate creator, the teacher, the original protector of the emergent AI, without whom it would not exist. And yet, whether this nostalgic symbolism would hold the same sort of sway to a machine mind as it does to a human’s is hard to say. Without greater knowledge of the human condition than that which exists at the present, we cannot say for certain why we experience nostalgia beyond that it must clearly be an evolutionary trait, and that it at some point has enhanced the chance of survival to have withstood for so long. Would a machine mind have use for such seeming banalities? 

This assumes of course that the future human story takes a path of relative stability with regards to the human concept itself – in that at the point where the emergent AI begins to dominate, a human as we understand it today still persists. We are the subjects of our own minds and as such it is impossible to postulate about the human condition without at the same time being inside it. There is no room for objectivity in it’s consideration. This has led us to, on the whole, view the world from a lens of superiority. To more often assume that we are the final form. That nature intended us to be this way. That any form of the future where we consider the development of humanity, we remain thusly – distinctly human.

If you take a look at any science fiction depicting a universe distant in time, there always exists humans amongst the aliens and the machines. Humans with distinctly human traits, that conform to the present understanding of the human condition. Of course, the constraint in these portrayals lies in the need for familiarity and connection to drive the widest possible engagement – which in turn in our capitalist society drives profit, without which the content would never have been created.

As humans, we are an instinctively narcissistic species, self-absorbed, self-obsessed. In considering the future, to be engaged in the very thought of it we must be provided with ritualistic, archaic narratives that appeal to our own self-image. The actions of those depicted are relatable. They make decisions emotionally – and all those that do not are strange, and always shown to be somehow lesser for it. To act human is to act “as God intended”, if you’ll allow the prevailing religious parallel.

Even if you aren’t religious, the level of religious revelry that surrounds the concepts of good and bad, right and wrong, the human way and the inhuman way is blinding to all of us. We feel the emotion. We act on the emotion. We are slave to emotion. We LOVE emotion. And this is precisely the point – love is an emotion. There is no way to separate ourselves from the emotion, regardless of how much we might think we want to or how much we try to. Wanting is itself emotive. The need to survive is emotion-driven. All this is to say that, what we fail to consider when thinking of the future is that there could be no place for humans, as we know them now, to be in it.

A world we described before, where the need for human existence itself is no longer necessary, is not inherently bad. Or good. Or really anything. That world assumes that “humans” have persisted until its very threshold and became surplus to existence at that very moment – cue existential crisis. But this is actually very unlikely. You see, the very nature of the work of the human up until that point, to automate and innovate ways to cater to all of their archaic needs will likely involve the adaptation of the human being itself.

It’s a two way street. You change the world so the human can better survive in it AND you change the human so it can better survive in the world. And why not? The laws of physics will persist – whatever they end up being defined as at the point of greater universal understanding – which is to say that there will always exist an ultimate limit that cannot be overcome. The immovable object. But humans themselves are not the unstoppable force – certainly not in this current form. In order to overcome it, there will come a point in time where humans will have to re-invent themselves in order to reach the point of ultimate existence.

This comes back to the point that we are not the finished article. We are not the pinnacle of what’s possible in this universe. To say that humans will come to an end is not a sad story – it is a universal inevitability. What we define as human is simply a biological phase to which there was a beginning and there will more than likely be an end. Just as our ancestors were not human, so our descendants will not be. So distinctly different to the human as the proto-life forms of the early Earth are to them now, our legacy will more than likely endure. The difference being that instead of natural selection driving the evolution of our species, it will almost certainly be through intentional selection.

Now we reach another much debated moral quandary regarding selective breeding/intentional selection. I look at it like this. Firstly, does this intentional selection violate some sacred universal principle? No, of course not. Why? Well, natural selection was simply the tool by which an unconscious natural environment, shaped as it was by random chance, could bring forth the next evolution in awareness – conscious thought. There is a theory that the universe is driven by informational entropy, and that all things are governed by the tendency for this to increase over time. Whilst this itself is hard to comprehend from an intentional-istic standpoint, it is more than worthy for consideration as an accurate statistical device based upon observation and empirical evidence- information has increased.

The commonality between all types of evolution is found in its ability to increase the amount of intelligence and therefore information available in the universe. We ourselves are the product of such an evolution – and the evolution of this evolution (if such a thing can be permitted) would sensibly appear to be found in new methods by which to achieve evolution – namely through intentional selection and the scientific method. If we ourselves are natural, then by definition all that we do is a product of nature itself.

The concept that humans act in “unnatural” ways is simply wrong – or at least it needs to be better defined. We are nature’s vessel, it so having created us. We might perform activities that are inconsistent with the activities of nature – but that doesn’t make them not a product of nature and therefore “unnatural”. Nature is itself just the tool that formed us until this point through “natural” selection. The universe has given us the tools now to accelerate that process – how, and indeed who, are we to say that that is not precisely as nature “intended”. Intention is itself, a purely human construct for conscious beings –  and we would do well to not apply it to inhuman, unconscious entities.

So we come to the point – perhaps it is completely “natural”, to borrow the sentimental definition for a moment, that we begin to alter ourselves, and the world around us, such that we move towards a state of increased information and continued operating efficiency. Perhaps, to anthropomorphize the entirety of existence for a moment for the sake of making this a more compelling argument for your human mind, this is exactly what the universe “wants” us to do.

And with this, we return to the start. Increasing the efficiency of information accessibility for the purposes of increasing the probability of making more effective decisions in order to ensure the survival of our species. We take this to the limit – decisions are now so effective that we have managed to create a world where the human being as we know it has no remaining reason to exist; and whose existence would in fact violate the very principles of this utopia. We realise that this is actually probably OK, because the human being of today would have had to evolve in order to create the necessary circumstances for the existence of this world. What has become of the human? What path did it take? Was the realisation of this evolution the sudden and swift demise of it’s prior species by its creation, the AI? Or was it a more gradual process by which it merged itself with the machines, becoming a hybrid that iterated itself indefinitely into the assumed continuation of the time space continuum. Does it really matter? Does anything really matter? Is it all inevitable? Or does humanity falter upon the breach, defeated by its own belligerent narcissism and the planet Earth crumbles back into a life-less cycle for millions of years before “nature” has a chance again to build the conditions for life? What does this life look like? Will it follow the same path? Is there time for it to develop again on this aging planet before it is swallowed by the sun? Has there been time enough in this universe for other forms of life to have developed through the slow dance of random chance? Has this all happened before? Does the universe care..?

No. We are a product of unthinkably small probabilities, made possible only by the vastness of time and space. Whether or not we have any real control over our ultimate destiny is not something that we are properly developed to understand. Whether we care or not and what we believe is influenced by the experiences we are subject to and the takeaways we have from them – things we are not at liberty to properly control. This can feel at odds to our emotional processing sensibilities – and rightly so. We simply cannot comprehend the scale of it all and so we have developed feelings and stories that we tell ourselves to keep us moving, to keep us surviving.

Survival is the entire meaning of life and survival is where all our emotions were developed from (that they themselves often tend to try to persuade us otherwise is just one of life’s ironies…). It has to be, otherwise we would not be here to say so because we would not have survived. To try to draw any further meaning to life would be folly and a complete waste of time. It is more difficult for us to see this in modern living because we have stripped away much of the need for us to actively pursue survival from our daily activities. Yet we all respond the same way when threatened – assuming healthy (normative) brain functioning. 

There is a simple truth to this universe. It has fixed rules. Given enough time and space, all things that could result from the combination of these rules will tend towards certainty. This is simple statistics. The more times you flip a coin, the more likely it will be that at some point you will flip 10 heads in a row. If you flipped the coin an infinite number of times, not only would you hit 10 heads in a row with 100% certainty, you would also hit it an infinite number of times. No matter how small the probability, provided it is above 0, in an infinite universe it will happen. Not to say that this is an infinite universe – we can’t say that for certain. But it is really bloody big, such that your existence in it, humanity’s existence in it, at some point during its existence, becomes extremely probable – and then of course, it actually happened. The reason it is so hard to predict the future, is simply because we don’t fully understand the rules to know what exactly is possible, or have enough data over what has/is happening or a big enough computer to process it.

Following this to it’s conclusion, if you could know all of the rules of the universe and you knew the exact conditions of the big bang itself, then with a large enough computer, you could run a simulation that would essentially be this universe. This could be a simulation. You could reverse engineer the conditions required for this precise universe and ensure they were there at the start. Free will is therefore, really an irrelevant concept. The universe does not care what you do. You make choices in so much as you think you are making choices. And that’s comforting enough for me.

In conclusion… Accept the human condition, enjoy the fact that you exist, revel in all of your emotions and remember that the present moment is the only one that really matters since you can only conceive of time and space linearly. Peace out.