Should we go to Mars? A Second-best Shot at Species Immortality.
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This 20-minute talk attempts to explain the evolution of intelligence from now to the end of the Universe. It's a stretch. :-)
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Should we go to Mars? A Second-best Shot at Species Immortality.
- 1. Should we to go to Mars? Jim Morris 7/2/12
- 2. Maybe a new species we create will dominate the Universe! How do we do that?
- 3. Evolution • Darwin explained evolution. (1858) • Mendel explained genes. (1865) • Watson and Crick explained DNA.(1953) • Hamilton explained gene’s power over creatures. (1964) • Dawkins explained memes.(1976)
- 4. Richard Dawkins Genes Tall Smith Bender Root Heuck Simpson Hershey Masich Sheehan Bernard Edwards Broff Hill Posvar Becker Morris Barensfeld Carter Schoyer Bald ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ Memes Brown Hair Black Hair ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ Altruistic Conservative ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔
- 5. How are memes stored?
- 6. Memes are more important than genes.
- 7. Ray Kurzweil Memes are exploding.
- 8. Exponential processes usually stop and become S-curves.
- 9. David Deutsch The dominant force of the Universe is Intelligence. It is carried forward by all species in a kind of relay race. Humans appear to be carrying the baton, at least for the Solar System, at least for now.
- 11. Evolution According to … Hans Moravec Ray Kurzweil David Deutsch
- 12. Evolution in the News • Self-Reproducing Robots Set to Test Boundaries of Space—SpaceDaily, 5/11/2005 • How the iPod explains Globalization—New York Times, 6/30/2011 • Is This the End of Market Democracy?—New York Times, 2/11/2012 • Is Google Making Us Stupid?—The Atlantic, 8/1/2008 • Diagnoses of Autism on the Rise, Report Says—New York Times, 3/29/2012 • College Tuition is out of Control—Washington Post, 10/11/2011 • Rich Mom, Poor Dad, Women Become Breadwinners—NPR, 3/20/2012 • What Structural Unemployment Looks Like—New York Times, 9/26/2010 • America’s big wealth gap, is it good, bad, or irrelevant?—The Christian Science Monitor, 2/14/2012 • Why Ayn Rand is Hot Again—Reason, 10/10/2009
- 13. The End
- 14. Herbert Simon Reconsider our place in the Universe. The definition of man's uniqueness has always formed the kernel of his cosmological and ethical systems. With Copernicus and Galileo, he ceased to be the species located at the center of the universe, attended by sun and stars. With Darwin, he ceased to be the species created and specially endowed by God with soul and reason. With Freud, he ceased to be the species whose behavior was—potentially—governable by rational mind. As we begin to produce mechanisms that think and learn, he has ceased to be the species uniquely capable of complex, intelligent manipulation of his environment. I am confident that man will, as he has in the past, find a new way of describing his place in the universe—a way that will satisfy his needs for dignity and for purpose. But it will be a way as different from the present one as was the Copernican from the Ptolemaic.
- 15. Alan Turing Mathematician Karl Popper Philosopher There are universal computers that can simulate any computer. Alonzo Church Mathemat ician Knowledge creation is evolutionary. Jared Diamond Physiologist Memes are more powerful than genes. Ray Kurzweil Inventor Gordon Moore Intel Founder An interstellar computer will dominate Earth by 2050 Andy Clark William Hamilton Richard Dawkins Evolutionary Biologist Evolutionary Biologist Genes drive behavior that replicates themselves. Memes are mental genes and subject to evolution. Psychologist Intelligence is a property of ecosystems, not individual brains. Hans Moravec Robot Scientist Robots will be descendant s of humans. David Deutsch Quantum Physicist Intelligence is the dominant force of the universe.
- 16. Summary • The egg (gene) is more important then the chicken. • The meme is more important than the gene. • Thinking occurs in ecosystems. • Computer networks are the preferred ecosystem. • Intelligence is the most important thing. • It persists and grows. • We are currently carriers.
Editor's Notes
- No, humans should not go to Mars. We are learning plenty about Mars right now, through our robots. Astronauts don’t need to fly the space ships or explore planets.All they do is add drama.Robots are expendable, so their reliability and returnability aren’t so important.In the short term, robot exploration is a much better bet.In fact, I believe that robots should do all space exploration.The only practical argument for human exploration that humans might outgrow Earth or make it otherwise uninhabitable. I think it is easier to solve our problems here. And, in the long term, humans like us will become extinct.Putting a bunch of us on Mars or a space ship for hundreds seems a poor strategy to produce a robust species. So, we’re not going anywhere and eventually will disappear; get over it. However, there might be a consolation prize.
- My answer is “Maybe a new species we create will dominate the Universe.” It will take some explaining.
- Here is a table of people and some of our genes and memes. We all got our genes from our mother and father. They determine many basic things like hair color. They also set the stage for our memes—elements of culture—to further determine what happens. Memes come from our total environment: parents, churches, schools, libraries, and the Internet. Scientists are still puzzled over whether altruism is a product of memes or genes, but conservatism is probably all memes. Richard Dawkins explained these ideas in his book The Selfish Gene. He pretended that our genes and memes are simple creatures with a drive to create copies of themselves. Just as we want to create children, they want to create copies of themselves through biological reproduction; memes want to replicate themselves through some kind of communication. of course, being conceptual things, genes and memes don’t actually want anything; it’s just a shortcut to understanding how evolution works. Like genes, memes can trump humans. For example, religious memes like tithing, evangelism, and ritual suicide serve to propagate religions to the possible detriment of their adherents. Maybe the reason so many of us talk to each other and even ourselves is to propagate memes. When you get a ticket for talking on your cell phone while driving, tell the judge your memes made you do it.So if you want to predict what will happen, keep your eyes on the genes and memes.
- We know that genes are stored as DNA, thanks to Watson and Crick. Memes are stored in other ways. Let’s consider the meme “how to tie a bow tie” Some some of your store that in yourbrains. others have is stored in a clip-on. A hammer stores the meme about leverage.Writing is better than talking for passing on some memes, but drawing would be better for bow ties. Computers are basically ways of transforming memes, in the form of programs, into action. A computer with sensors and manipulators is a robot, and a bunch of computers linked together is an Internet. I use YouTube to remind me how to tie a bow tie. Knowledge in action is intelligence, so we call these devices artificially intelligent.Memes are easierto create. It took millions of years to develop genes for legs, arms, walking, and brains, while the memes for languages, tools, civilizations, writing, and religions, appeared just thousands of years after the genetic hardware was in place. Then memes for new technologies like roads, cars, fission, computers, and the Internet appeared after some hundreds of years. Unlike genes, memes build on each other at an ever-accelerating pace that appears to have no limit.
- The man on the right, Jared Diamond, says that he was less genetically fit than the New Guinea aborigine on the left, but is much better off because he is imbedded in an intelligent environment with books containing millions of memes. Take away those memes and he’s less likely to survive than the aborigine who has all his memes in his head.Diamond’s book Guns, Germs, and Steel claims that Eurasian cultures dominated the Indians, Aborigines, and the Africans because of their plentiful memes:guns, steel, writing, armies, ships, and the rest.
- Here is a graph constructed by inventor Ray Kurzweil purporting to show that computers match a mouse’s brain today and will match a single human’s intelligence by 2020, and will be able to compute more than all humans put together by 2050.The dots are costs of computation, drawn from semiconductor costs subject to Moore’s Law and the power of earlier mechanical calculators. The improvement in computing power represents the ability of computer engineers to squeeze more computation out of less material and power. Their knowledge is what is exploding. In general, all knowledge is exploding.I’m using the word “exploding” literally. For example, if an interest rate gets into loan shark territory, the amount owed doubles each year with devastating effects. Nuclear fission an exponential process; a split atom releases many particles that go on to split other atoms. Kurzweil claims that the “interest rate” for technology growth is actually increasing as well. So this isn’t just a phenomena like “the rich get richer”; it’s like the richer get richer and have twice as many kids, each of whom is equally as rich at birth.Explosions usually peter outbecause something limits them. In the case of memes, their growth will peter out if it depends on just humans to create them.But we are finding ways to keep the knowledge explosion going. The tools we use—telescopes, electronics,nanotechnology, biotechnology, etc.—get more powerful each year, along with our knowledge of how to exploit them to produce more knowledge and more tools. For example, computer designers use computers to design the new computers; we have programs that automatically write new programs based upon their experience. Knowledge feeds on itself and doesn’t depend on any scarce resource. Kurzweil and physicist David Deutsch imagine computers and robots carrying knowledge throughout the Universe, grabbing matter and energy to build more of themselves as they go.
- All exponential processes we know of, e.g. biological growth, fission explosions, and stock market bubbles, come to a halt as they bump up against physical limitations. I began to ask myself why intelligence--defined somehow--is different. Q: Can intelligence grow faster than the physical resources devoted to it? It all depends upon what you mean by "intelligence." If you define it as the number of pages in the world's libraries, or the number of additions per second all our computers can do, the answer is "No." You have to have a non-physical definition, obviously. If general or particular intelligence can be meaningfully measured on an unbounded scale then the answer is "Maybe," based upon the obvious fact that N bits can describe 2^N numbers. For example, we could define one's relative Go intelligence as one's ability to beat another person in 2 out of 3 matches. We can then undertake a very large Go tournament in which we match all the possible programs(partial recursive functions) against each other in timed matches so that a program that never halts looses its game. At any given time there would be a current world champion, represented by a program with N bits (including storage). If we define the absolute chess intelligence (ACI) of a program as the number of other programs it has bested in the tournament, the best ACI of the best program can grow exponentially relative to its size. While this measure might be artificial, it seems plausible that Go ability may have unbounded growth potential based on how deeply a program can explore a game tree, at least for a version of Go generalized to have ever-increasing board sizes. The key to this argument is that we can throw away any program that has been beaten so storage is needed only for all the undefeated ones. Of course, this process is flawed by the fact that luck may enter into the tournament results; but that's life. We'll never know, anyway. If we are seeking unbounded absolute general intelligence we can generalize this technique. We need an effective procedure W(p,s1,s2) that decides if s1 is a better solution to a problem p than s2. Then we can run an even bigger tournament for all the problems and solutions we care to generate. The problems can get quite hairy, e.g. produce a program, s, that beats all other programs on all the problems, p, that have been generated so far. The hardest part of this endeavor is creating W. Deciding which of two solutions for a particular problem is better can be hard or impossible to define for many problems. We could get the ball rolling by empaneling a committee of the world's smartest people (choose your criteria) to define the procedure and, implicitly, the kinds of problems it might be good for. It might be possible to define the problem of creating an improved W, too, in which W would be the judge; but maybe the committee should stick around to choose new champions for a while. None of this discussion give any hint of how to actually make this work. It was only intended to indicate that physical resources might not limit the growth of intelligence.
- Deutsch is the boldest prognosticator of all. His book, The Beginning of Infinity, tells a story of how Intelligence comes to actually control the physical Universe and comes to know everything in the final moments of the Universe which will seem to last forever.At the moment, we have the honor of carrying it forward. However, if we destroy ourselves before finishing the job of creating artificial intelligence, some other species—maybe those damned cockroaches—will take over. Deutsch seems confident, however, that somewhere, somehow, intelligence will triumph Even it this happens, you might not think we deserve the credit, but here’s how we can claim to be ancestors of the giant meme complex of the future.
- I have been wedded to the information environment of books, computers, and the Internet for longer than to my wife, Susan. I have produced some memes, which are sort of like intellectual children. People who encountered those memes might have produced more memes from them. My wife is completely aware of this bigamy and complains about it occasionally, but she also admits she married me for my memes more than my genes.So like Adam’s Rib, our information environment is a sort of new sex that sprung from our minds when people started talking and writing a long time ago. The meme complex of the future might not contain any of our DNA, but it is our descendants nonetheless.
- There are many theories of how this technology-based evolution is going to go: Carnegie Mellon robot engineer Hans Moravec sees robots as our children. Deutsch envisions some sort of intergalactic descendent of the Internet. Kurzweil sees prostheses and biotechnology making us into cyborgs. In fact, if you have fillings, take drugs, or have a pacemaker you are on that path. If evolution follows the biotech path, engineering artificial intelligences with some sort of DNA, maybe some of ours will actually make it into the future.
- Bringing us down to Earth: If the future is anything like I suggest, we should see signs of it today. Here are some headlines that I think are suggestive of evolutionary forces at work today:• The rise of finance and the power of global markets is brought about by advancing communications and computing technology.• Unemployment and the wealth gap are caused by technology which the rich and smart can exploit to become richer and smarter at an accelerating pace, leaving many behind.• Autism might be caused by smarter, richer people meeting in colleges and mating.• Because knowledge is now a big driver of success, colleges are getting more expensive• Women are making more money because knowledge doesn’t depend upon the Y-chromosome.
- Here’s what Carnegie Mellon’s Herb Simon said about us. I’ll let you read it.Copernicus: We’re not the center of the universe.Darwin: We’re not a unique species.Freud: We don’t control ourselves.Simon: We’re not the most intelligent species.Deutsch: We’re not the most powerful species.